Ruminations on the Digital Realm

Even for Planete Beranger, which never shies away from a strong opinion on the weaknesses of Linux distributions, the one week Linux distro hating week is quite a lot. However, the list of items that need fixing does give a lot to think about:

large enough repositories to satisfy both desktop and server users;

both GNOME and KDE3 should be offered as main options, alongside with whatever else is the main focus of the distro (smaller DEs/WMs or KDE4);

security updates and major bug updates that don’t break the system, that are provided in a timely manner and in the proper place (e.g. not it Debian’s “volatile” for tzdata; not in “testing” for VL; not ignoring FF 3.0.3 even by RHEL);

not to include functional regressions from a release to the next one (in the kernel or in the major applications);

not to force the users to upgrade because a release is supported for too short;

not to lack major applications in such a manner that the user should either build from source, or get them from several third-party repositories, thus compromising the intended advantages of using a certain distro with a certain quality and consistency of the repos and of the updates;

not to freeze each and every application to a fixed version for the whole supported lifetime of a release, ignoring the fact that building newer versions of the applications is possible when they don’t require newer versions of the system libraries;

not to ignore bug reports for years, especially when the fix would be easy, or especially when it’s about an enterprise distro, whose modest number of packages is small precisely because it’s supposed to be much better maintained than a community-maintained distro;

not to break the package manager every now and then, and not to change the default package manager from a release to the next one;

to provide the full sources in free download, not partial sources, nor just build scripts that would attempt to download the sources from upstream;

to be usable in X with only 256 MB of RAM — failing to do so is a clear sign of bloatedness, regardless of the fact that very few users have such low-end systems;

to have a GUI version of the package manager, and this version to be usable in terms of speed on low-end systems too;

and of course: not to require hours of post-install configuration and customization by the end-user!