What was it about eD 2.4?

[Kurt Wall]

Quoth Tina M Berendt:
> Given the recent interest in resurrecting and maintaining the old 
> Caldera distro, I thought I'd take a minute to ask everyone to quantify 
> what it was about eD (or eS) that was so great. Was it the file layout? 
> The installer? The GUI tools? What? I used and loved eD, but find it 
> hard to say why I felt it was so nice. I *think* a lot of my fondness 
> has to do simply with familiarity... once I learned "the Caldera way" on 
> OpenLinux, eD was such a natural progression that I think a lot of my 
> 'it was so great' is simply because I *knew* it.. however, I now 'know' 
> SuSE, but don't have the same warm fuzzy when talking about it as I do 
> when talking about eD....

I've never had the warm fuzzy for any distro the way I had it for
eDesktop 2.3 and, even more, eDesktop 2.4 - 'course, maybe because
I helped build 2.4, I'm biased. I liked OpenLinux 1.3, too. Vis-a-vis
eDesktop 2.4, though, a lot of time and effort went into to making it,
in large part because we (at what was then Caldera) knew we had to 
offer a compelling alternative to Red Hat, which, even in 1999 and 
2000, had already captured considerable mind share. That extra polish
showed.

These days, the extra effort that went into eDesktop 2.4 isn't necessary
because there is no real competitor on the desktop to Red Hat. Red Hat
have won the branding wars (in the U.S., anyway), so they no longer are
trying quite as hard to produce a polished, seamless, trouble-free
product. Why should they, when there's no one left with whom to compete 
for desktop space and mind share?

> It seems to me that it would be a *lot* easier to start with a current 
> base system (perhaps LFS based) and then mold it to be whatever it was 
> about eD that everyone liked instead of taking an old eD and upgrading 
> it (remember that eD wasn't even ready for 2.4.x and 2.6.x is right 
> around the corner).
> 
> So, what *specifically* made eD so great?

- The installation worked 95% of the time (the other 5%, though, bag
  it)
- A terrific set of applications
- Almost everything worked; almost everything worked together
- Solidly engineered -- some might say solidly _over_-engineered
- Good tradeoffs between features and stability, with a tendency to
  prefer stability to features
- Reasonably attractive
- *Great* mailing list
- Pretty decent company behind it
- Self-hosted build system - the binaries shipped were built from the
  sources shipped
- No library conflicts

Kurt
-- 
Who's on first?