Mageia 2 Linux Released

[DanL]

@DanL: You obviously don't know the context in which I asked that question for you to say a statement like that. I'm asking what benefit do they have of branching.

Again, if you have to ask how the Mandriva/Mageia branch benefited those who broke away from Mandriva's backing company, then you don't know about that real-world example, which perfectly answers your general question...

If you've got 5 brands of gum that all have flavors that are almost indistinguishable from each other and offer the same price, why do you seriously care about getting any of the other 4? And then you see another company come along and do the same thing, but why?

In some cases, the different flavors of Linux are very distinguishable, and that's just from a user perspective. Even when the flavors are close, if you put the "employees" of a lot of these "companies" in the same room and told them to design and make gum, they would end up strangling each other before ever making a viable product.

[schmidtbag]

Again, if you have to ask how the Mandriva/Mageia branch benefited those who broke away from Mandriva's backing company, then you don't know about that real-world example, which perfectly answers your general question...

I disagree, but if you think you're so sure about that why don't you explain it? I've read and re-read the history of Mageia, and I still don't see a GOOD reason for their efforts that answers my question. Again, just because the community wants to make it thrive, that isn't a good enough reason to make a new one. I'm sure the company wouldn't be against some outside assistance, and even if it were, as I've said before - its not that hard to just install/remove a few packages from another distro to get the exact same results.

In some cases, the different flavors of Linux are very distinguishable, and that's just from a user perspective. Even when the flavors are close, if you put the "employees" of a lot of these "companies" in the same room and told them to design and make gum, they would end up strangling each other before ever making a viable product.

Right, and as I've said before, I don't care if there's dozens of distros, as long as they're good and have something new or compelling to offer. For example, I think its perfectly acceptable for there to be a different ubuntu for each DE. There's enough changes to qualify as new distros. But I remember when I first got into linux about 5 years ago, the GNOME setups for ubuntu, mint, fedora, suse, and so on were all nearly identical. They had varying colors, some of them came with a different office suite or package manager, but otherwise they were pretty much all the same and it would only take a few minutes to change one of the distros to be almost exactly like one of the others. And yes I know you can argue that some of them have special features that only 1 distro may have, or some of them are more stable or cutting-edge than others, but in the end a desktop user just wants it to work well. Back to the gum analogy, the way its working now is if all these companies were shoved in the same room, they're arguing over what kind of packaging to use, whether that that be plastic, foil, or paper. They're still arguing but its an unproductive argument.