Why can't Ubuntu be this organized?

[Meson]

I'm a firm believer that being organized goes a long way, just about further than anything else. So why can't Ubuntu be this organized? http://code.google.com/android/what-is-android.html

I understand that most PC's are little more complicated, and also vary far more than the single Android. But that architecture looks pretty robust.

[toupeiro]

What is your definition of organized? What about Synaptic Package Mannager, or add/remove? Ubuntu is a distro, which uses a linux kernel, which is also called a platform. take a look at sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/). Pretty organized if you ask me...

[FuturePilot]

Ubuntu is messy? :-s

[pt_lam]

I think it's just the organization is different, doesn't mean that ubuntu is not organized.

[Meson]

I've always thought of the Linux kernel as messy in general compared to BSD. But it just looked like Android had a nice layer of abstraction for a comprehensive api.


I wasn't saying "Let's do it!", just "Let's talk about it"

[Tundro Walker]

You have to take into account that Android is ...


a) a relatively new "OS", designed from the ground up with all the knowledge and experience of past mistakes taken into account



b) it doesn't have much (if any) "legacy" junk it has to keep supporting



c) it's generally owned / maintained by one group

Ubuntu, however, is built on Linux, which...


a) has been around long enough to get quite the collection of legacy code as well as legacy methods for doing things. Heck, Linux modelled after Unix, and that's a dinosaur OS by comparison. While it would be nice to have it all re-vamped to utilize the latest and greatest ideas in computer science, sometimes your legacy piece keeps you from re-doing things.



b) is more of a communal thing. Ubuntu may be a distro maintained by a single company, but a lot of components that go in it are legacy or developed by other groups (the kernel, some apps, xorg, etc). You use another groups stuff, you inherit their progress ... and their legacy. Sometimes they can come up with newer, better ways of doing things, like Pulse Audio instead of ALSA, but you might be waiting on others to do that, since a distro "owner" is usually just interested in making the components mesh well together. (Canonical & other Linux companies actually take on projects that help the fundamental Linux system, so in a way it helps, but it's still communal.)



c) it's meant for "Swiss Army Knife" operation, like running on multiple platforms, hardware, etc, of various age doing various things. You need a lot of code to do that, and sometimes it's implemented and organized in a hackish fashion until someone comes along and re-organizes / cleans it up.

This is also an "issue" with MS Windows. Vista is pretty bloated and somewhat slow because it has all this legacy code it inherits from past Windows iterations. Microsoft experimented with creating a new OS from scratch using modern technology and design principles as the foundation, and that was the Singularity project. It probably out-performs Vista in tests all-around using modern hardware, but it loses the legacy capability. However, Win7 is supposed to be more modularized, so folks can get rid of more legacy code if they don't need it. Linux, however, sort of already does that.

[Meson]

Good points, especially about the legacy hardware.

Android is built upon Linux though.

[TomMK]

There's something very attractive about good documentation isn't there.

No? Just me then... :)