“The single, standard version of Gnu/Linux that John Ott is
asking for was accomplished about six months ago, when all the
major distributions finished migrating their libraries to glibc.
The other big standardization issue, the distribution format, is
settled for all practical purposes. The well-known commercial
distributors (Red Hat, Caldera and SUSE) all use rpm format for
package distribution and installation. Other distributions, such as
Debian and Slackware, are used mostly by system hackers, and need
not greatly concern commercial-application vendors.”
“Leading-edge utilities such as Linuxconf and COAS are
functionally invariant with respect to the user’s moment-to-moment
changes between local or remote X Window, a command-line interface
on the console or a serial terminal. Windows applications should
not make any assumption about which window manager or GUI the user
will select; in general, different users on the same host make
different choices. Users will not give up this flexibility.”