[Wolves] Ubuntu Derivatives

[Peter Cannon]

On Tuesday 15 August 2006 05:45, Andy Smith wrote:

> What sort of adverse effect were you thinking of?

Um, I dunno really, to be honest I was meusing more then anything else, my own 
personal opinion (which probably is not worth a rats arse) is that the 
majority of off shoots are pointless other than to give the Administrator 
something to do and in their view some qudos.

Now if Ubuntu was a textural only release then it would be a a different 
matter as I suppose you could thinly maintain that viable desktops were being 
developed for the text only release but even then I just don't get it? For 
example as you all know I'm a Fedora/SuSE man yet I don't see KFedora, 
EduSuSE.

> The only obvious one I can think of is poaching users (and therefore
> mindshare), but I think that for every user of (say) Kubuntu that
> does not use Ubuntu there is going to be more than one user of
> Kubuntu that would never have touched the Ubuntu family were it not
> for Kubuntu.  If you see what I mean.

I fully accept the Ubuntu uptake is huge and is a classic example of the 
Linux/Open Source community in that each and every one of us can hide away  
in a dark room working on an obscure feature relevant to about 14 people.

> A more ineteresting example may be Red Hat's enterprise offerings
> that cost a fortune to be a registered user of, and the host of
> clone distributions that are very similar but for free.  I imagine
> Red Hat sees them as having an obvious adverse effect of losing them
> some small amount of sales.

Ah! Now that I do see/get White Box and CentOS are a prime example of what you 
are saying I understand the reason and method its because cheap skates like 
me want to run an RH Webserver, cant afford the license so use CentOS 
instead, the only  difference I can see between CentOS and RHEL4 is the icon 
set and themes I mean CentOS even uses the RHEL4 repos! Madness

Dave Morley--<Copy>--
>The main reason I feel for Ubuntu's 'different' distro names is mainly
>because rather than have a dozen cd's to download or a dvd you pick
>the desktop that suit's you, it's then available on one cd.  However
>I'm sure it would of been easier to simply add a package downloader
>similar to easy ubuntu rather than set up a whole new desktop.

Am I being stupid? Every distro I know lets you choose what desktop you want 
you could argue that size is the issue here but I don't think that holds 
water as free DVD's are available so downloading isnt really an issue, so I 
get my grubby hands on Ubuntu and load whatever Desktop I want (initially so 
long as its Gnome if I'm correct or does the DVD have KDE as well?)

Jen Phillips --<Copy>--
>A distro is more than just what you get on the CD. It's also the forums, irc
>and community around it. All these flavours of Ubuntu have their own little
>community groups, which wouldn't exist if all the customisation were only
>available through getting the main distro and tweaking with Synaptic. So if
>you're interested in some obscure aspect of running KDE on Ubuntu, you know
>the Kubuntu people are likely to be able to help, because they've
>specialised in getting it working nicely.

Ok I see that but my thought still holds that the same could be achieved from 
the one release for example there are loads and loads of irc, forums and 
mailing lists for different features, Gnome Desktop, XGL, Zen etc etc.

>Also, split projects tend to draw attention away from each other, but most
>flavours of Ubuntu are branded as such, so they feed attention back to the
>main distro. Add in the fact that most of them will be feeding patches, bug
>reports, etc back to Canonical, and the Mother Project wins there, too.

I wonder if whats really going on is a rebellion to the traditional way of 
doing things in that as you say rather than mooching around the XGL forum you 
go to the Ubuntu/XGL forum.

Maybe I'm being thick or intransigent I still don't see the need for the 
mushrooming offshoots when the same can be achieved under the one release. 
Choice is good but I wonder if some newcomer who will be reticent enough  
anyway will not be overwhelmed by all these versions that in truth only have 
a slight name change and a different theme/wallpaper? 

-- 
Regards
Peter Cannon
www.cannon-linux.co.uk

"There is every excuse for not knowing
there is no excuse for not asking"