SEUL: LaetOS: Some thoughts about Distributions, Users and Goals of this project

[Stefan Haller <hals@bigfoot.com>]

Hi al

I just thought about what the guys at independence and seul
were talking about. Espescially what the discussion about
which distribution to choose etc. lead to, or is leading
towards.

Do we make the end user and the linux community a favor when
we create just another entirely new distribution?

I would say: no, its confusing to the users.

Additional arguments why *not* to create a new distribution:
- The end-user is a guy who buys his software just out of the
  shelf.
  ->  LaetOS is a open source project.
    -> How do we want to distribute our OS
      -> How do we want to pay for that?!
- Some guys were talking about standards and setting them.
  -> How can we set standards?
    -> we must get a big market share to be important
      -> How should we do that? The market is shared more or
         less between the big distributions. SuSE in Europe,
         RedHat in America, Debian in the open-source-community
         and quite many other distribs in other parts of the
         world or with other user groups.
- A new distribution needs new testers, new package maintainers
  etc.
  -> Does it make sense to do the same as all other distributions
     over and over again? That needs much time, but it doesn't
     support the linux community much.

What I think we should do:
We should interact with *all* or at least most of the big
distributions, even the commercial ones. Only this way we
can *really* serve linux.

We should develop tools that simplify installation and
configuration for end users. But it makes no sense if only
our tiny distribution is using it. This would be some kind
of proprietary, even if we didn't want to be.
And that doesn't makes sense to me.

again:
we should develop tools that other distributors can use in
their software. We should ask them for their needs. If they
are commercial or not is not important at all.

Too, it can't be the goal to revolutionize the desktop. That
is what KDE and GNOME are trying to do. A third party who tries
to that is not efficient and leads to more confusion, even for
pre-intermediate users.

The idea about plug and play setup utilities, X based
installation and easy configuration of applications is
a very good thing, but to build a new distribution doesn't
get us any nearer to the target.

This would mean only, that we concentrate our resources on
a topic that other guys are already working on; testing and
packaging etc.
And I don't think that we could do it better than all the
others...

Comments on this?

Regards
  Stefan

-- 
"Those are my principles! And if you don't like them... well, I have
others..."
	-- Groucho Marx