I am at a point in my life when I don't care about being a zealot. By that I mean that I don't care that im not one. I really think this war and zealotry between linux distributions needs to end. Specifically package management. Ok. I don't care that .deb is easier than rpm. I dont care that rpm spec file's are hell. I don't care about the ego's and pro / merits of one over the other. I will gladly learn how to work with either of them if we could just please standardise on one of them.
On a Windows system, you get the .exe, double click and install. We really need one unified package management that makes it easy for any linux newcomer to just double click and install.
I recently did some work at a government department and one of the IT people wanted Linux to play with. No problem. Have a look at ubuntu. Great. He got it installed, music and videos playing. ok. Groupwise... ok. Thats released by Novell and its in RPM. Yes, there is a forum post how you can use alien, convert it, make a deb, relink the java. Fine. The fact is that the stupid end user cant do all of this!
Take the .deb developers. Take the .rpm developers. Put them in a room and make them work a new standard out, that everyone agree's to. Failing that, frame them like poor Hans... (hans reiser)
anyways. enough :)