Linux and Main: The Great Unfolding

“The collapse of dozens of also-ran Linux companies–and there
will one day be a collectors market in the CDs they sent out–led
many to the wrong conclusion. As a result, the big guys changed
direction and marched as fast as they could toward the server
market. Desktop Linux hadn’t died, they said, it had been
stillborn. Linux distributions still for the most part shipped the
same stuff, but this stuff was more server oriented than
before.

“It was during this period that one of the best features of
boxed Linux distributions disappeared. Time was, part–much–of the
printed documentation was a list of the packages included, what
they did, and what they required in order to run, their
dependencies. This was very useful for two reasons. First, it
allowed the user to install a bare system, then go back and pick
and choose to arrive at the system he or she desired. Second, it
was a reminder of the fact that no matter how much in lockstep
distributions seemed to be, it was all still up to the user. But
this useful bit of documentation has all but disappeared in favor
of a flood of increasingly flashy–not to say reliable–automatic,
we-know-best installers. Perhaps this was to make tech support
easier, which presupposes that tech support was planned, maybe as a
way of making money on otherwise free software. I’ve not heard many
happy Linux tech support stories involving distributions; when
answers are gained, they involve mailing lists or email to package
developers.

“The absence of a desktop Linux market was further evidenced, or
so we were told, by the failure of various distributions aimed at
desktop users. Few pointed out that this might just have been
because those distributions weren’t much good. A nice, standard
little distribution, which complied with the LSB and FHS, that
provided a kernel and XFree86 and a choice of desktops, perhaps
some configuration tools, and the things necessary to compile
applications–this we did not see. ‘Desktop’ distributions tried to
reinvent the wheel, making themselves incompatible with everything
else, splitting off ‘devel’ parts of packages, and trying to tie
users to binaries from that particular distribution. Every time
desktop Linux said ‘I’m not dead yet,’ along came some
ill-conceived distribution to club it over the head…”

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