from Hacker News

Wasted Creativity in the GNU/Linux Distribution Diversity

by gnuarch on 2/5/19, 8:54 PM with 43 comments

• by jlarocco on 2/5/19, 10:12 PM

  Not this self-centered, ignorant complaint again.

  Even if this time really is 100% wasted, it's not your wasted time, so it's none of your business anyway. Open source devs don't owe your their time, and you're not entitled to tell them what to work on.

  But the time isn't wasted, in any case. If existing solutions met people's needs the alternatives wouldn't have been created. A huge project like a desktop manager or a Linux distribution doesn't get spun up on a whim because somebody doesn't like a desktop background, and it's telling that that's the only difference the author notices.

• by theonemind on 2/5/19, 9:41 PM

  Well, perhaps so, but Linus, regarding Linux (although I think he meant mostly the kernel), said,

  "I'm deadly serious: we humans have never been able to replicate something more complicated than what we ourselves are, yet natural selection did it without even thinking. Don't underestimate the power of survival of the fittest. And don't ever make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit."

  In that light, this strikes me like complaining that we have too many kinds of beetles. Linux distributions just work this way.

• by markstos on 2/5/19, 10:01 PM

  Bah. Diversity is good for the ecosystem.

  Do you complain about the plants and animals with only minor differences as being redundant, a waste of evolutionary effort?

  Just a generation ago there was understanding that we had let too much power accumulate into too few large, multi-national corporations.

  Then we got a chance to start over with the internet and new digital companies. How quickly we repeated the same mistakes. Now we have trillion dollar tech companies and wonder if they've gotten too big, too centralized.

  What cognitive dissonance to bemoan the consolidated power of just a few FAANG companies while also complaining that the diversity in open source software isn't the kind of diversity you'd like to see.

• by brendangregg on 2/6/19, 2:31 AM

  I worked on Sun Solaris (it's now dead, I know), and now on Linux. This was like switching from a Universe with one Linux distro, to the current one with many.

  The speed and priority of bug fixes and feature development was higher with one distro. Everyone was working on the one thing. Any bug ever found could go straight to _the_ best engineer to fix it, who could replicate it _immediately_ since they were running that distro as well, and they could make it a priority to fix as it affected _all_ customers.

  Now consider many Linux distros. A user says "this doesn't compile on NiftyLinux". A) The developer hasn't even heard of NiftyLinux, and doesn't have immediate access to reproduce the bug. B) It's a low priority to fix, since most of the developer's users are on Ubuntu or CentOS.

  I've felt this firsthand with the performance tools I've developed for Solaris and Linux. With Solaris I could provide better support. With Linux, there's bugs that are open for months or years for odd Linux distros that I don't have time to explore.

• by dansman805 on 2/5/19, 9:39 PM

  On one hand, time and effort is wasted doing the same thing 100 times with slight differences rather than just working on the same thing. But on the other hand, in my opinion these differences are very important. For example, you listed that only a few desktop environments are necessary. While that may be true for the vast majority of Linux users, the more fringe desktop environments/window managers are great. For example, I use i3wm daily and it's a pleasure to use. While some of the DEs listed in the article may have some tiling, the WMs designed specifically for tiling do it better (in my opinion). That's the glorious thing about there being many tools that do ostensibly the same thing, you can almost always find a tool that fits your niche use case.

• by noja on 2/5/19, 9:26 PM

  A very top-down utilitarian way of thinking about it. So what if there is wasted effort, people want to do that, so they do.

• by eterps on 2/5/19, 9:24 PM

  And the most creative distribution IMO: NixOS isn't even mentioned.

• by kgwxd on 2/5/19, 10:03 PM

  There is 0 substance to that link. How did this hit the front page?

• by dsego on 2/5/19, 9:51 PM

  I agree, it's ridiculous. Hundreds of distros but all include the same 5-10 usable apps. Great, I can run GIMP on Ubuntu, Fedora, Solus, Mint, Elementary, etc. It's still GIMP.

• by b0rsuk on 2/5/19, 11:14 PM

  I think many people contribute to Linux because there are all these extra distros. People have different needs, and gather around a different itch to scratch. If there wasn't a distro focusing on Rasberry Pi, performance or security, they wouldn't be there.

  It's like saying there should only be 10 programming languages. Vast majority of programming languages never takes off, and many are very niche. But you never know which are going to take off and when.

• by mimixco on 2/5/19, 10:22 PM

  I don't think the problem is too many options. This is one of the great benefits of the free market.

  The biggest problem with Linux distros, IMHO, is that nobody has really created a packaged install that's simple for users to get running. Ubuntu is ahead of the pack but there are still many issues... creating a USB boot stick, using Ubuntu under Windows, accessing your network with a VPN -- those a just a few I've experienced.

  Until a Linux distro gets to the level of packaged, simple installation like users enjoy with Windows and Macs, the operating system won't take off on the desktop. And that's a real shame. We need open source software more than ever.

  Perhaps there's room in the market for just one more distro that can solve this!

• by giomasce on 2/6/19, 5:24 AM

  It seems that the author is only aware of the existence of general-purpose distributions. They did not list any distribution with, say, different approach to packaging, or for use in HPC, security, NAS, embedded, you name it. Also, for some reason they cannot avoid listing more or less all well established general-purpose distributions, while that is really the list between which you are supposed to choose one or two if you care about not trying many similar things. It seems that the only criterion to be on this list is to be well known. Same for the DEs.

• by spacesuitman2 on 2/6/19, 12:00 AM

  It's not wasted at all - people are learning and configuring, tweaking and optimizing their use of a computer. I for one really like the fact that Manjaro is an easy Arch for me. Is it wasted creativity now that I can focus on non-distro work since I found my distro?

  Besides, who is the author to tell people to not waste creativity. It's remarkable to have this audacity. Even the notion of "wasted" creativity is just not nuanced.

• by a3n on 2/5/19, 10:02 PM

  Why not just Slackware?

  The author's list got to be the list in mutual cooperation and competition with the list and others.

• by haolez on 2/5/19, 11:57 PM

  Not sure why, but this remembered me of Tiny Core Linux: https://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/

  It's a very different and clever way of deploying Linux.

• by darkr on 2/5/19, 11:45 PM

  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ People are free to do whatever the fuck they want with their time and creative energy.

  Here’s to anyone who ever scratched an itch, created something and then gave away the fruits of their labour for free.

  A thousand more distributions and desktop environments!

• by jotm on 2/5/19, 9:22 PM

  One can dream... Linux would've replaced Windows by now if that happened.

• by seba_dos1 on 2/6/19, 2:40 AM

  This makes me want to spend some time creating a new distribution with its own desktop environment.