Originally posted by liam
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"We need standards."
(Sorry if I am strawmanning you on this one; I wasn't 100% sure what you meant by "we need standards", so I took a guess.)
Do you mean we need to increase compatibility across multiple Linux-based OSes ("distributions") by way of standards? Well, we have LSB and that's been a failure. LSB mandates standards that are in conflict with what distribution developers feel is the best approach. LSB was dead on arrival. Experienced standards bodies have figured out - and developed policies and operating guidelines in accordance with - that one does not simply "mandate" standards, period. Something must first become a de facto standard before it can hope to have success as a de jure standard.
LSB tried to force consensus where consensus had failed to develop naturally. The various distributions did things the way they did because they felt that their approach was the best. For example, Debian developers and developers of distros based on Debian felt that the .deb packaging format had advantages over the .rpm format. If they did not feel this way, they would have switched to .rpm on their own, without being prompted by LSB. And on the other hand, requiring support for BOTH sides of an incompatibility, as was done with Gtk+ and Qt, just leads to bloat.
I think that cross-distribution compatibility is very important, but I do not believe that this problem can be solved very easily. Standards by themselves will always fail to gain acceptance and adoption as long as the underlying causes of the incompatibilities are not addressed. Take, for example, FFmpeg vs Libav. Those are two projects with deeply ingrained animosity towards each other, and growing incompatibility between the two leads end users and downstream developers not directly involved with either project to take sides as well. Backing one with a standard and ignoring the other will result in the standard failing and will not have a strong impact on adoption of one over the other.
Although the FFmpeg-Libav conflict is caused by engineers, there are other artificial incompatibilities* that are created by managers (hint: http://translate.google.com/#en/ru/peace). Driving more open source projects towards corporate control will not fix this problem. Instead, we'll trade freedom and incompatibilities born of passion for vendor lock-in and incompatibilities born of marketing / sales needs ("market segmentation", "product differentiation").
*My appologies to any FFmpeg or Libav developers. I've read up on the projects and realize that the FFmpeg and Libav incompatibilities are not entirely artificial.
"Alsa needs to be fixed."
I'm not qualified to write about whether it's ALSA or something else in our audio stack that needs to be fixed, but I don't believe it's all that important for the typical desktop user. I'm not saying that typical users don't care about audio, I'm saying that for typical users our audio is "good enough". My direct experience is that audio in Linux-based OS'es still sucks for professional use, but I think that doesn't impact typical users that much.
"We need a solution to configuration and management that doesn't include bash scripts or, in general, opening a cli."
Yes, definitely. I think continued improvement in auto-detection and auto-configuration is the best approach, although improvement in and wider adoption of graphical administrative tools like Yast and MCC is also important.
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Ultimately, I agree with you that there are some areas where Linux-based OS'es are lacking technically. My personal vote goes to lack of native ports of destination programs. Games, creative tools, tax and accounting software, that kind of stuff. However, I also feel that there are some areas where Linux-based and *BSD OS'es have significant advantages, or else we wouldn't be using Linux-based or *BSD OS'es in the first place. A good marketing campaign would focus on these advantages. I think that a very appealing sales pitch can be made for Linux-based OS'es ("reliable", "proven track record", "puts YOU in control", "respects your freedom and right to privacy", etc. etc.), and I think that such a marketing campaign would do magnitudes more for increased usage share than fixing technical disadvantages would. I think that without marketing, Linux and *BSD will always compete with a handicap.
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