Re: [Trisquel-users] State of Linux and the Desktop

[gymnarchusniloticus]

IMHO, we need more centralized efforts. Right now we have about 500 distros  
and most of them are exactly the same with a different feel, this makes new  
users confuse. Give a link to DistroWatch for a casual proprietary software  
user and you will see what I'm talking about. I was a distro hopper for a  
year and a half before settling to Trisquel. I have used at least 50 of  
DistroWatch's top 100. The problem is, different package manager needs the  
same porting again. So you have apt/yum/pacman/conary/pisi wars and all of  
them need different packagers for the same package. No repository right now  
is as big as Debian's. Another issue is porting to different architectures.  
Each distro (including a simple remaster) would need more people and more  
redundant effort to be ported to another architecture (PPC, SPARC, etc). In  
this sense I prefer to support Debian because it is "universal". It is the  
only distribution easy to use which has support for more than 6 different  
processor architectures and different kernels (kfreebsd and hurd). Debian  
fits on everything. Can be a server, rolling desktop, stable desktop, for  
Free Software enthusiasts like us (just disable the non-free repository and  
refuse to load the proprietary modules), serves for old computers, source  
based with build-dep, etc.

About the desktop environments, I am currently watching the Elementary Shell.  
They are using Vala which is more high level than C and has the same  
performance. Way easier to mantain than C (the language of all the other  
DE's, KDE uses C++ but is not the same thing). Their code is also cleaner and  
just "does the job".