Re: Distros specifically designed for children

On Wed, 28 May 2025 12:34:28 -0000 (UTC), Borax Man wrote:

On 2025-05-27, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

>
Moral: those who are brought up under a regime that doesn’t give them

a

choice, often find it difficult to adapt to having freedom of choice.

 
I don't think this story is apropos.

Like the Communists, you lack a grounding in the basic laws of economics.

Pointless choice can be a net cost.

If the gain offsets the cost, then the result is profit.

The Free Software world is a shining example of free-market economics in
action, in a way that proprietary software is not: the barriers to entry
are low. That’s why you have so few choices among proprietary software,
and so many among Free software. The situation of having 300-odd Linux
distros has been like that for something like 15 years, if I remember
rightly.

Basically, it’s gone well past the point where anybody could claim that
this situation is somehow unsustainable.

At the moment, all cars that take unleaded petrol take the same size
fuel nozzle at the petrol station.

And don’t forget, all the roads and road signs are standardized, as are
all the controls in those cars. That gives you the freedom to own whatever
car you want, and drive it on whatever roads you want, to go wherever you
want. And then get rid of that car and buy another one, whenever you want.
You have standardization with variety and interoperability, and minimal
fragmentation.

The correspondence in the Free Software world is that all those Linux
distros are built on the same Linux kernel, mostly include the same common
GNU userland core, and offer most of the same core apps. This gives you
the freedom to run whichever distro you want, use it to do whatever you
want. And then replace it with another distro, without having to throw
away all the work you’ve done.

Now imagine that some doofus at a car company really thinks that the
nozzle should be 1" wider, so they build two variants of cars, one
slightly more expensive, and it only works at the pumps with the wider
nozzles.

Nobody would buy their product ... unless they had a really huge
advertising budget to tell everyone how wonderful it was, and why those
who don’t switch over from the common, perfectly-good standard are missing
out on something wonderful.

Sound like anyone you know?