I have been thinking for a long time that Linux distributions as they usually are composed today is not optimal. What I mean is in the beginning of linux distributions there were perfectly valid reasons for distributing the linux os together with as much applications as possible on CDs. The reasons was of course users did not have bandwidth enough to download such beasts. Today the situation is not the same. I think this include all stile has a number of problems.

1. There are no real difference between OS and applications.
2. It is hard to distribute applications to todays distributions because it has to fit some distributions release plan.
3. It puts a huge burden on distribution makers.

What I would like to see in the future is:

One or more Linux OS distributions.
Application distributions (Like a KDE distribution).

and so on...

The idea of having projects concentrated at what they are good at.

The problem with this approach is probably:
* Package formats (.deb, .rpm, ....)
* Defining the interfaces between the distributions.

This is kind of a dream of course.

/Mats

Sounds like Arch Linux. http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Linux
And then you have Chakra, a KDE distribution based on Arch. Is this close to what you meant?

It sounds more like the Build Service. It automatically builds binaries for a wide variety of distributions and distribution versions with just one command, including both rpm-based and deb-based distributions, and then makes them available in a central repository.

At a first quick first look at Arch Linux. Yes it seams to be something like that i mean. For the build service, maybe must be investigated further..

/Mats

You might also want to look at Gentoo, which I think is closer still - all the packages are built from source and are modified as little as possible - that is, only to make them work properly. This allows the user to decide which features are to be installed for each package (like building KDE without nepomuk), and create a unique system based what the user wants.

Like Arch, Gentoo does not have a release cycle, so new packages are added and updated every day. But, unlike Arch, Gentoo has a number of different version of the same package, so if you don't like a new version for some reason, you can still use the older one. Aside from that, there are numerous overlays which allow you to install packages that are not officially supported yet. And, if you want a package that is not in an overlay (like some plasmoid), it is generally pretty easy to create an ebuild script so that the package manager can install it for you.