Hmmmm... I don't have a problem with that analogy... Linux is building (or is it rebuilding) one distro after another.
Well, I'm not trying to be mean or hostile. But to be honest with you, what you just said demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of what Linux and open source actually is. In fact, I would go so far as to say the two individuals in the video are at least partially responsible, apparently being largely ignorant of these matters themselves.
"Linux" is the kernel of our open-source OS, just the very core part. It's named after a cross between the name of the original developer (Linus Torvalds) and the word "Unix", the OS design philosophy that Linux is based on. There is no "Linux" distribution, nor is "Linux" a company or a single group. To be fair, it would be more correct to call the OS "GNU" in a generic sense than "Linux", since Linux, while an extremely important part, is only one piece amongst a lot of open source software.
Linux is the
kernel of a GNU operating system. Every operating system has a kernel, not just GNU. To oversimplify things greatly, the kernel is the part of the OS that talks between the software you run and hardware you run it on. To put forward an orchestral metaphor, if the hardware were instruments and software musicians, the kernel would be the conductor. We only call the OS "Linux" for simplicity's sake, but it's actually no one entity, there are many groups (non-profit, corporate, and ma & pa, you name it) that have their own OS flavors that use Linux as a kernel. What they all have in common is that they use Linux as the kernel, and a lot of other open source software around it. Like the KDE and Gnome desktop environments, the Firefox web browser, etc. For more info, read up on
GNU - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and
Linux kernel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
So anyway, I hope you're getting what I'm alluding to here. You can't generalize "Linux", because it's not one central organization with one central goal. It's actually a whole lot of various open source software, including the Linux kernel itself, packaged together by various unrelated groups of people.
Specific distributions are built very differently from one another. For example,
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is built to stricter, more strenuous standards and tested for longer than most other OS'es on the planet, including OS X and any flavor of Windows you like. As a result, it's very corporate-feeling, very stable, and extremely reliable. It's also not a very fun desktop, since testing the packages for a long time means they're fairly old when it finally ships. This is perfectly fine on a server, but you wouldn't want a multimedia system running RHEL, I can tell you that.
Then there's
Debian, which is like the Swiss Army knife of Linux distros. It too is extremely well tested, almost to a fault. But there are 3 current branches of Debian that are supported at any given time: Stable (codenamed "Etch" at the moment), Testing (called "Lenny" currently), and Unstable (always codenamed "Sid", after the unstable kid in Toy Story). Stable is a lot like RHEL, in that it's not very exciting or cutting edge, but it's extremely well tested and predictable. Testing is the release candidate for the next stable build, so it's actually really reliable. Testing strikes a good balance between fresh and well grounded, meaning it makes an excellent general purpose desktop operating system, or multimedia box. Sid is for people who don't mind having their toys broken from time to time; it's where the major changes happen, and the kinks get worked out. It's fun, in a geeky way, but you probably wouldn't want it running on a production server. :) There's also two branches I didn't mention, namely "Old-Stable" and "Experimental". Old-stable is the stable version before the current one, and it's always supported for at least one year after the latest stable build is released. Experimental is so bleeding edge that it's usually completely untested, hence the name. This is where brand new software is introduced for induction into Debian, and like all others before it, it must run the gambit of testing and peer review before it will be shipped in a stable build. This means making it from Experimental to Sid, sid to Testing, and then being released with testing as a stable build. After which, it will get security updates for the lifespan of the stable build.
Then there's
Gentoo, a source-based distribution you build on the fly as you install it. Of the other distros I've mentioned thus far, Gentoo is the most like the metaphor these two wanna-be tech gurus alluded to in their video. It is for enthusiasts who are willing to get really down and dirty and touch every piece of software on the system to get everything "just so". Obviously this makes it somewhat impractical, and others in the larger open source community often jokingly refer to it as the "
ricer OS". :chk:
So you see, what type of presence Linux has on a computer is entirely up to which distro of Linux you choose to run. Since each is built and maintained by a different group of individuals with often very different goals in mind, their form and function will vary greatly. As for me, I have chosen a "best tool for the job" approach. My wife's and my desktops both run Debian "Lenny", which has been a fantastic desktop in our experience with it. My web server and file server both run
CentOS Linux, a community repackage of the aforementioned Red Hat corporate distro. It's exactly RHEL, but free of charge, and with all the corporate logos removed. Then my firewall runs
pfSense, a firewall distribution based on
FreeBSD 7, another UNIX-like operating system. These things are all very similar under the hood, but each has different goals and intentions and they are highly specialized for what they do. This means they are also highly effective as compared to more proprietary, expensive and time-consuming solutions such as OS X or Windows.
