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Re: [tlug] State of "Linux" documentation [C&C]



Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Jonathan Byrne writes:

 > In my view, those are all different operating systems that share a common
 > kernel (more or less; good luck with dropping a Red Hat kernel into a
 > Debian system) and userland (more or less), that run - for the most part
 > - common windowing environments or full desktop environments.

I think it's defeatist to call those different operating systems, just
as it's outright silly to say that a Hummer and a Toyota Yaris are
"different transportation systems". I think it is indeed sad that (up
to the income and preferences of the driver) the Hummer and the Yaris
are both "cars" sharing the same UI, but we're lightyears away from
being able to say the same thing about open source OSes, which share
far more parts than the cars do, but somehow manage to totally miss
the point of that commonality.

But then to a mechanic a Hummers manual isn't going to help you much working on a Toyota Yaris. I guess if you take this analogy further the automatic car interface would be your gnome/kde gui, which is pretty much distribution natural, except when a distribution decides to merge a left hand drive with a right hand drive to get the best of both ;)


 > Nobody's wringing their hands or the fact that a book on Solaris
 > might not be all that useful to a person using HPUX.

Since when have they stopped distributing manuals as part of the
package, though? You buy Solaris, you get a pretty good book.

We didn't, unless you count the online documentation. Looking at the Sun site, things appear to have changed[1]



Edward


1. http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp


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