[oclug] Corel getting out of Linux

[cbbrowne at hex.net]

Dean wrote: 
> I was one of the original Beta testers and did a review for Maximum Linux. I 
> rather liked it. As a desktop distro, it was the slickest I had seen. I was 
> very disappointed when Corel decided to stop developing it.

Ah, so one of the people to "blame" for Maximum Linux :-).  (Hopefully your 
review was one of the bits of sanity and/or technical correctness; the magazine 
was prone to _needing_ to have articles/columns that full of "Cool Profanity" 
as well as being _So Up To Date, Dudes That We Make Rashly Wrong Statements_.)

> I'm hoping this new company, Xandros, will start refining the Corel Linux OS 
> further. 

The problem is that this begs a few issues...

The main problem with Corel Linux was that its development seemed pretty 
separate from that of Debian, on which it was based.

That is, Corel built a few components (mostly Qt-based, which was, at the time,
controversial) to help with system administration, making it somewhat 
artificially distinct from Debian "proper."

As soon as you wanted to do anything that wasn't pre-bundled into it, like, 
say, compiling programs, you'd need to use apt-get to sync it with a "fuller" 
version of Debian.  And since Corel wasn't making much effort to stay up-to-
date with "official Debian," this meant that vast quantities of software would 
suddenly get pulled in, making your system "no longer Corel Linux" anymore.

The next problem evoked by that is that Debian [and many of its components] 
represents a pretty fast-moving target: by now, many of the tools that Corel 
custom-built likely have more functional KDE and/or GNOME and/or Debian 
equivalents.  Gnome was pretty toyish back then; it's matured to have a fairly 
useful set of applications now.  [And both Gnome and KDE are _still_, to some 
extent, dueling for the status of "most-nearly-in-alpha-stage" what with the 
KDE folks having the brand new KDE 2.2, and Gnome folks pushing on Bonobo 
integration...]

There's the "yet another issue" that in these days of Red Code and such, it's 
quite critical to keep security updates rather up-to-date, which _again_ means 
that if Corel/Xandros aren't keeping things fairly much in sync with 
Debian/stable, Trouble Will
Lurk.