gOS Gadget Aims Ubuntu At Cloud Computing 36
DeviceGuru writes "The gOS project has released version 3.1 of its Ubuntu-based Google-centric distribution. The release draws its packages from the Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) repositories, but adds a bright green theme and a few alterations in default applications, but more importantly adorns its desktop with numerous gadgets based on the Mozilla Prism project along with an animated application-launch icon set based on the wbar project."
Re:Who Gives a Shit (Score:4, Insightful)
Who are you talking to? From your post, it sounds like you imagine there's one group of people who are constantly making new distributions and never finishing them, and we need to convince those people to stop doing that.
In reality, it's usually that a new group of people form around an idea of what they want out of Linux, which is a different idea than other available distributions. Since the other distributions already have a direction that isn't going to change, and this new group has no power to make existing distributions change, they start building their own version.
And really, there's no problem here. The freedom to come up with your own distribution or fork an application has been invaluable to Linux. Ubuntu (one of the most popular distributions today) was one of these "new" distributions just a few years ago.
Re:Who Gives a Shit (Score:4, Insightful)
If someone makes a distro dedicated to killing puppies, but in the process comes up with a feature that's invaluable to everyone else, the other distros can easily take that feature and integrate it. The other distros don't have the change their direction, and the new puppy-mashing distro developers can work in an environment they're confortable with and with a purpose they feel strongly about, while still contributing to the community as a whole.
Re:Who Gives a Shit (Score:1, Insightful)
This is also one of its biggest disadvantages. The fact that there are tons of distros means that if someone wants to write a device driver, office suite, browser plugin, game, etc that targets Linux, they have to deal with a myriad possible configurations of library versions, desktop environments, themes, sound systems, etc. Most commercial developers decide it's not worth it.
Re:Who Gives a Shit (Score:3, Insightful)
This is also one of its biggest disadvantages. The fact that there are tons of distros means that if someone wants to write a device driver, office suite, browser plugin, game, etc that targets Linux, they have to deal with a myriad possible configurations of library versions, desktop environments, themes, sound systems, etc.
Nonsense, they don't have to deal with that, they can write the code and let the distros package it.
Most commercial developers decide it's not worth it.
Oh I see, you mean proprietary software developers decide it isn't worth it. You wouldn't really have meant commercial developers because that would include Red Hat, Sun, etc who write linux software.
Seriously, the whole linux thing is not centred around making things convenient for proprietary software developers. This seems to surprise a lot of people but I don't know why.