How about if they target one distribution. For example, a consumer app might be best suited for Ubuntu. Certainly not fedora or the more techie distributions that are targeted at developers.
I am only favoring Ubuntu since I have used it a bit (as a consumer). But it seems to be the closest to a mainstream distribution.
Just my 2cents. :)
> Sound like you are one of those people; an engineer?
Correct on both counts.
:)
> How about if they target one distribution. For example, a
> consumer app might be best suited for Ubuntu. Certainly
> not fedora or the more techie distributions that are
> targeted at developers.
Actually there already is some of that. For example, there are considerably more user-oriented packages for Ubuntu than there are for RHEL for the reasons you noted.
Such packeges are easily installed with the distribution’s package manager.
However, those of use making use of the more techy distros are not one-dimensional creatures. Many of us are artists, audiophiles, and videophiles, and we’d like to have those applications run natively on our distribution of choice.
For such distributions, the source code is provided so that the application can be compiled natively. However, compiling natively often involves hunting down other packages that the app depends on (dependencies), because the native package manager cannot resolve them.
The reason that virtually all high-end image/video/audio software is developed for both Windows and Mac is that each platform has only one distribution, and support is typically only required for two major OS realeases at any one time.
I would venture that it is possible that, collectively, Linux distributions outnumber Mac, but there are just too many of them, and some, like Fedora, are moving targets, while Mac is monolithic and stable.
Thankfully, we have the virtual machine. You can run your favorite Linux distro and windows on the same hardware platform at the same time.
This requires powerful, multi-core processors that support virtualization. Also, a “virtual host” should have considerably more memory and disk space to supply its “virtual guest” with a good working environment.
VirtualBox (free from Oracle) even has a “seamless desktop”, where both OS’s share the same desktop. You have two taskbars, one for Linux, one for Windows, and their respective apps materialize on the same desktop. This “seamless desktop” seems to be very fussy about the graphics engine, so you may want to do some research before getting frustrated with it.
There are cross-platform development environments, like Qt and Wx, so you can write apps that run on a number of different platforms, iOS, Windows, MacOs, Linuxes, Android, etc, but the apps I’m typically interested in are not developed this way. So, I use the virtual machine.