Was sad to read today on TechPress that PCLinuxOS is going to split. I really feel that right now the linux community doesn’t need more fragmentation. Of course it’s great that there are so many distributions out there catering for a wide variety of tastes and demands, but what Linux badly needs right now is a core of large dists that are stable, updated reliably and with a community large enough to create the critical mass needed to really challenge the other OS players (specifically Windows and MacOS). PCLinuxOS does fall into this category and so I feel it’s sad that the community is likely to split.
There are already 101 smaller options and to be quite honest there are arguable only 5 or so mainstream popular titles to chose from. In my opinion, the PCLinuxOS community needs to rally and sort out their infighting. Having a founder / ‘owner’ who disappears for a year is clearly not acceptable, but is that really a reason to break up the project? People must accept in any community there will always be those who don’t agree. If a democratic system is set up with clear guidelines over who is in control and a mechanism to ensure decent project leadership this really shouldn’t be an issue. I think what people need to realise is that the project is bigger than they are and that sometimes we need to put our differences aside for the greater good.
None of that is true. A few people left back in March to create their own thing and many many more came in to replace those that left. PCLinuxOS is stronger today than ever before.
Linuxlover – I really hope what you say is true. It would be such a shame to see this great dist fade into many small insignificant ones.
one whiny server administrator didn’t like that the developers weren’t listening to her interfering, so she decided to take her toys and go running crying to Tex, who sadly believed her and her truth distortions. so now she trolls the internet, using multiple names to cover her tracks.
it’s not that PCLInuxOS is *going* to split, it already has. Unity Linux has its own repository with a few thousand packages and has had an ISO release. check out http://unity-linux.org/ and http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/unity/
as far as Linuxlover’s claimed “many more developers” who have stepped in, those are by and large pretty green to the art of development. it’ll take a couple of years for them to be trained up to the level of where the Unity Linux developers are now.
oh yeah, and those “few people” that left– many more developers left than stayed. (especially if you count the remasters that left– but to be fair, those left not because they had been maltreated, but rather because Unity promised to be more open to its remasters)
http://alternativenayk.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/oh-no-pclinuxos-in-trouble/ , comment #4 says:
“Of those [previously claimed] 6-7 people on the development team, 2 had minimal contributions to PCLinuxOS 2009 and calling the third a developer is quite laughable. All the other people -those who *actually did work* on PCLinuxOS 2009- left.
Anybody who has followed PCLinuxOS development in the past year and looks at the Unity forums will see that pretty much everybody who was somebody with PCLinuxOS is GONE. They are now with Unity.”
Actually it was one power hungry developer and his buddies who wanted complete control over the direction of the distribution and ignored everyone else. He made up a lies to so his buddies would go him.
PCinuxOS now has more than 25 developers with enough experience to put the people who left to shame.
If you follow the developments of Unity you will find many who initially joined have since departed because they thought it was going to be open but found the same few people are still making all the decisions just like they did when they tried to control PCLinuxOS.
The developers at Unity are the same who pushed the big update out at PCLinuxOS which turned into a big nightmare for many of us. They turned their backs on the community, walked out and left many with broken installs and broken packages on the mirrors.