News about Bruce Peren's UserLinux distribution

 Ubuntu Aftermath: Puncturing The Linux 'Urban Legend', Jul 13, 2007

Most of us, even confirmed Windows users, have accepted on some level the idea that Linux really is a better operating system, on a technical level. Not me; not anymore. After my long slog preparing Ubuntu Linux's Achilles' Heel: It's Tough To Install On Laptops, I'm now filing that one in the "urban legend" folder.

UserLinux is a Linux distribution with very high aspirations. Founded and backed by Linux luminary Bruce Perens, part of the UserLinux mission is to repair the economic paradigm of enterprise Linux.

UserLinux has released its first beta CD and is widening the scope of testing. The project, led by long-time open source advocate Bruce Perens gives enterprise customers a certified version of Linux without the support price tag and restrictive licensing policies offered with commercial distributions from vendors like Red Hat and SuSE.

In an article on Vnunet.com, entitled "Perens readies old-school Linux, but who wants it?" readers get another look at mainstream media bias toward the open-source community. Credit the Vnunet author for doing what many journalists do -- jump on a topic about which they know little.

Last January, on my flight to LinuxWorld, a nice married couple sat next to me on the plane. We exchanged pleasantries and went back to our magazines. I glanced over at one point and saw the young man reading my then most recent article in Linux Journal. I did a double take.

"Repairing the Economic Paradigm of Enterprise Linux" was the sub-title of Bruce Perens's 2003 white paper floating the idea of UserLinux.

Now the distro he envisaged, a system for both desktop and server use in businesses of all sizes, is close to release. (There is a wiki devoted to it here.) The plan is for a mass beta for i386-based systems September 1. It will be a a focused, user-oriented version of Debian, say its supporters.

We, the undersigned KDE and Debian developers, fans and users of both, present this strategic proposal for a closer collaboration between the UserLinux and KDE projects. It is our strong belief that we can provide the UserLinux effort with undeniable value and credibility through its endorsement and execution.

UserLinux - intended to be a system for business people - will be GNOME-based and will not include Qt or KDE components by default, says project leader Bruce Perens. "Most of the software consolidation in UserLinux is going on by consensus," he explains. However, he saw that no consensus would be possible regarding the GUI. "So, I made a decision by fiat to get the project moving past the GUI issue."

In the original UserLinux white paper, I made it clear that the project would play favorites among the software choices available to it, and that the resulting process would be painful. You can't say that you weren't warned. But it turns out not to be particularly painful, except for one issue: the selection of the GUI used in the system. The selection of GNOME as the GUI of the UserLinux project has raised a good deal of opposition from KDE supporters.

Analysis of UnitedLinux’s results to date may be helpful to those thinking about jumping on the UserLinux bandwagon. This is not to say that UserLinux is destined for failure; on the contrary, Bruce’s effort to bring the same discussion to the community rather than the corporate level intrigues me.

In a move that some Linux users are likening to the attempt – doomed to failure, it turned out – to build a Tower of Babel, open source activist Bruce Perens pledged himself this week to the creation of a new Linux distro: UserLinux.

UserLinux would be based, said Perens, on Debian GNU/Linux, thus drawing on a pre-existing Linux project with over 1,000 developers behind it. And it would occupy the vaccuum that is going to exist in the consumer marker now that Red Hat is going to stop selling its consumer version of Linux in retail stores.

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