On Wed, Dec 24, 2003 at 06:58:48AM -0500, Robin 'Roblimo' Miller wrote:
> There's no real need for SLUG people to make a Live CD setup for
> Xandros. Don't forget, this is a *commercial* software company that is
> *not* releasing most of their work under GPL. Besides, Warren Woodford
> has already done everything they want with Mepis.
Interesting point. Beware of commercial entities who want to use you for
their work force. Sometimes it works out, and sometimes you get screwed.
<snip>
> Forget Lindows. Xandros is what Lindows promised to be but never became
> except in Michael's dreams (and hype).
Lindows seems to have been MIA for a while; haven't heard much about it.
Xandros is very nice, but I question if they can stay in business just
selling a Linux distro. It doesn't seem to be a profitable way to go.
Mandrake's in financial trouble. Red Hat stopped selling its user level
distro and is concentrating on the expensive server market. And their
Fedora project management has already pissed off at least one major Red
Hat booster who instead started up the cAos project. SuSE belongs to
Novell, and we don't know how that's going to go. But I believe they
made a lot of money doing consulting in addition to their desktop
distro. Of course, how much money you need depends on your overhead. One
guy = less overhead.
I love Debian. BUT... I'm cranky about the fact that they move like
molasses getting releases out. KDE is MIA from both testing and unstable
at the moment. This can't be that hard, folks. The Release Manager
recently put out a rant to the packaging folks that they needed to get
their butts in gear. I'm running stable right now, but I'm having to
compile X from scratch in order to resolve a killer X problem that won't
allow me to run the stable version of X. But if I wanted to run Gentoo
or Linux From Scratch, I'd do so. I'd love to have an alternative with
more up-to-date packages. I couldn't care less if it runs on every
obscure platform on the planet. One of the benefits of Debian _is_ the
breadth of choice, but then I'm a geek. I'd also like to see less
nit-picky argument about the purity of Debian. I believe they've
actually removed the RFCs from the main distro because their "license"
doesn't conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. Sheesh.
I haven't heard much about Mepis. But I'll definitely look into it.
Thirty dollars a year might not be too much to handle.
If I were Mepis, I'd stay away from Xandros. There's no need to pollute
Open Source software with proprietary installers and such. Besides, I
prefer the one-chief-many-indians approach (as opposed to the Debian
all-are-indians approach). In fact, I think collaberation in general is
highly overrated.
I'll have to take your word for the spiff/eye candy evaluation. Your
comments about cars and such are probably correct. Unfortunately, I'm a
guy who owned a string of VW bugs just because of their engineering. I
couldn't care less what they looked like.
Paul
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