Could you imagine if...

[dequire]

Could you imagine if all these people used all these hours and immense talent to just make Ubuntu and Kubuntu the best Linux OS in the world? This, my friends, is one of the downside to FOSS...MASS FRAGMENTATION that leads to mostly downstream changes / tweaking without any real upstream benefit. The choice is great, but it has a price. Like my screen randomly locking up on this office PC which is running 12.04 LTS.

[whatthefunk]

If there was no fragmentation, we'd all be using Unity.

[GreyGeek]

From my POV I consider the existence of over 100 distros and a dozen desktops an advantage, not a disadvantage. There is not as much disparity as you might assume. First, there is only one kernel that powers them all. Second, the majority use only two or three desktops out of the dozen or so that are available. And third, there are only two package management systems. Many distros act as test beds for new or novel concepts. KNOPPIX was the distro that created the LiveCD. Forth is the advantage if having several different offerings for each application genre. Eventually, the best of each genre begins to outshine the others. When a fork occurs, the end result is usually the absorption of the best parts from the loosing fork. Version control systems allow for such forking and merging with a minimum of trouble. With only one dev team we might still be using VCS, and SVN, Bzr or Git might never have been developed. Both Bzr and Git are drop-dead easy to use, and are vast improvements over SVN, which tried to make VCS easier to use, but didn't.

From a political point of view we've all witnessed the effects of a mono culture on the PC environment - stagnation, slow patches and repairs, and security holes (if such are admitted at all), power plays among the leadership, creation of artificial scarcity to justify exorbitant costs and to control competition. James Plamondon comes to mind, and his Mea Culpa after incriminating evidence of skull duggery was revealed in the Comes vs Microsoft trial.

[dequire]

If there was no fragmentation, we'd all be using Unity.

Even if there was just 50% fragmentation...I'd be OK with that. The ridiculousness comes when there's so much duplication. And really I'm talking about distros here...not DE's. But I see your point.

[NickStone]

...there are only two package management systems.

Are you sure about that?
dpkg
APT aptitude dselect Ubuntu Software Center

RPM Package Manager
YUM APT-RPM poldek up2date urpmi ZYpp

tar-ball
slapt-get slackpkg zendo netpkg swaret

Other
appbrowser Conary Equo pkgutils pacman PETget PISI Portage Smart Package Manager Steam Tazpkg Upkg

Info taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packag...tem#References

[GreyGeek]

The vast majority of Linux distributions use dpgk or RPM. The other package management system you found on Wikipedia are not commonly used on most Linux distros.


Tar is not a package management system, it is a utility for compressing or decompressing a file or collection of files to minimize the space they take up, usually to move it across a slow connection to another place.

APT is a console based front end to dpkg but was also was modified to be a front end to RPM as well.
YUM is a front end to RPM

Synaptic and Muon are gui interfaces to APT-GET,

[Guest]

Sometimes they could use more cooperation