[KLUG Advocacy] Re: [KLUG Members] Small Linux? (fwd)

[Adam Williams]

>Found something interesting, read it and see what you think.
>http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5818

Overall a pretty sound article,  my only question would be "Who is he 
argueing with?".  The majority of Open Source developers I communicate 
with are very aware that "the world" can't buy a new computer every six 
months or get a $500 PIII with oodles of RAM on the nearest street corner 
when they do go to buy a new computer.  I'd be pretty comfortable in 
postulating (I haven't actually counted) that at least 50% of the GNOME, 
OpenLDAP, unixODBC, gASQL, etc... developers I've had 1:1 e-mails with 
live outside the USA,  and many in countries where the mentioned 
constraints apply.  

Dependency problems, etc... are a result of very rapid evolution more then 
they are of "bloat".  GNOME is sailing at break-neck speed from 1.4 to 
2.0,  resulting in some frustrated users, but they *NEED* to get to 2.0 in 
order to solve the source of those frustrations.  If they were M$ they'd 
just go three or four years without a major release.  Do you want to use 
the GNOME from three years ago?  Or even one year ago?  I don't.  But I 
might have to pay another kind of price for a system with libraries that 
get updated every four days.  I don't *HAVE* to apply those updates, or run 
the newest applications, for any technological reasons. (I just happen to 
have a wife that wants every last feature one can wring out of GNUcash).

There have been problems with the VM of recent kernels that really hurt 
low memory machines.  But even Torvalds refered to these as just that: 
problems.  Something to be fixed,  and which to some extent have been 
fixed.

I thought the idea of a light-weight X for the frame buffer was a good 
idea, and there are several projects working on that so he isn't the first 
to think of it.  But then someone will want to do 3d on XFB or 
streaming-video (requiring mit-shm extensions) and it won't be so 
light-wieght anymore.  This is a natural problem with things like X,  
features pay of so well users "accept" bloat vs. not being able to watch 
their clips of the Matrix and Tomb Raider.