[plug] Linux Desktop Market

[Kirk Turner]

> Too often linux guys get wrapped up in the plans for world domination (ie,
> linux on every desktop and server) without asking the question 'why?'.
>
> If windows works for you, use it. It doesnt work for me, so I dont. It isnt
> necessary for every man and his dog to use Linux for me to enjoy it and get
> use out of it. I run Mandriva. My girlfriend runs OS X. My 4 year old runs
> WinXP. My brother runs Win98. My dad runs Suse at the moment (he chops and
> changes alot).

I agree with this statement - but what I see the issue with is for
those vendors that do go out of their way to provide (binary) linux
versions of their software then independent distro packaging
mechanisms (and as is pointed out rpm based systems aren't necessarily
the same from distro to distro) can be a block point for providing it
for all system. In this case you end up with vendors saying, we only
support distro x and the rest are on your own.

I think one example of this is that nvidia dumped using a package
manager and created their own installer. From what I can see they are
estentially doing something like autopackage does. Now nvidia allows
repackaging of these builds, so that the distros can do the hard yards
and do the packaging themselves, but I know not every license
agreement would allow this (java comes to mind). And for proprietry
products this would also be an issue. Should it achieve what it is
suggesting (be able to use dpkg or rpm to gain dependencies) I would
see this as a very viable method of centralising your package
management for packages coming from something that wont be part of the
distro's repository.

Kirk