Comment by prirun
10 years ago
I think the same points made in Larry's 1993 paper could be made about various Linux distributions:
Why a gazillion package managers?
Why not a common filesystem layout?
Why not a standard desktop?
IMO, Linus should enforce his Linux trademark by forcing every distribution to follow a set of standards. If they don't, they can't call it "Linux". If he got them in a room and said "This is the way it's going to be, or else", they'd do it.
The people that you are looking for are the systemd and FreeDesktop people. The former have a manifesto addressing this:
> The emphasis of systemd to provide a platform instead of just a component allows for closer integration, and cleaner APIs. Sooner or later this will trickle up to the applications. Already, there are accepted XDG specifications [...] that are not supported on the other init systems.
> systemd is also a big opportunity for Linux standardization. Since it standardizes many interfaces of the system that previously have been differing on every distribution, on every implementation, adopting it helps to work against the balkanization of the Linux interfaces.
-- https://ti.to/systemdconf/systemdconf-2016