It's such a pain when you don't know what distribution to choose. It's such a waste of time and effort for developers to port stuff from one distribution to another. It makes Linux/Unix more complicated (and scary) than it should be.
While I know there are certain reasons why the situation became the way it is now, I wonder if anyone has ever thought of reunifying the worlds of Linux and other (free) Unix? This is still a question: Have there been any (failed) attempts to unify Linux/Unix?
If you would unify the distributions system configuration tools and general behavior there would be no need for different distributions.
An advantage would be to define some binary interface for the applications. The The Linux Standard Base Workgroup tries to define some.
Here is a list of the specifications which are the base of some iso standards: LSB Specs
There was United Linux , which attempted to crete a baseline for linux distros.
In addition to what echox said.
Any attempt is an exercise in futility. Truthfully? I don't want to run my Desktop the way I run a Server, and the way I run my desktop, rolling bleeding edge, would not be good for everyone.
What we can and should do is attempt to minify the differences. I think things like the freedesktop notification API and Systray API which are now a pseudo standard (I think) is a good thing. The more we make things like that which takes duplication away from the dev's the better. Poppler is a good example of an app with a lot of split effort being pulled into one effort, now any app that needs to render pdf's has a good library to use on all platforms.
In short we should all try to share as much code an API's as possible instead of creating a new library every time we want to do something.
( Will someone create a standard api to access the 'system password manager' already (be that kwallet or whatever ) )
Well, when you said Linux you are only referring to the kernel. A distro itself is composed of many GNU tool/apps and other applications, and that makes it hard to make them unified as every developer or user has their own tastes and preferences, and that makes Linux distros vary. But the kernel itself is more or less quite unified.
As for unification or standardization itself, there are bunch of efforts such as Linux standard base and Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.
Just try and tell the OpenBSD crowd that they need to conform and be more open and see how that goes.
Each distro accomplishes a different task and does it well, if they don't then they have no business being in existance. Distros that add something to the community should not be forced into a single release, it would make for a massive clash of ideologies if nothing else. Nothing would ever get done.
This is like saying Windows and Mac should merge. Two COMPLETELY different philosophies and methods of doing things.
