You can't run garage band on Windows and Office for Mac is much more expensive.
You misunderstood me....there are endless different formats for installing applications in windows alone. There is not one install format that is used by all applications. The same is true for MacOS. The users don't even notice that.
Different package formats increase differences between distros and having one package format will narrow the differences between distros.
You really don't know what packages are, do you? You are aware that a rpm package or a deb packages is not much more than a tar.gz archive with some scripts and some meta data included? So we get rid of tar.gz, zip, rar and tar.xz now as well..because we have tar.bz2
Fragmentation is accumulation of all the differences between distributions, including the package formats. You are basically saying: "any one thing does not make clutter so therefore nothing should be moved"
No, fragmentation is what that makes distros incompatible with each other. Package formats do not..the executables they package are already incompatible..the package format does not change to that nor can correct it.
It would be like having different outlets and needing to deal with adapters: Pain in the but.
Since when is it a pain for a windows user to install with a double click? That's what we talking about here...there is no reason to be able to install rpm packages with a double click in debian a the moment as there are no debian rpm packages. But if we wouldn't have the fragmented distros it's not problem at all to have that in debian. As if users really care if something is zip or rar...as long as you can click it to open all is fine. So fix the fragmentation..and it won't matter for users any more if a aplications comes in rpm or a deb format...in both cases they just click on them and get the installed.
You have that backwards. I am suggesting that we convert everything to either AC or DC,
No, afraid you have that backwards...the package format is just a plug....the problems lie much deeper. Those problems must be solved...just making the same plug doesn't do that.
You are right! Internet is impossible!
Internet has exactly the same problem as linux...heard of flash? html5? jabber, gtalk....there are some standards from the w3c but the majority is just stuff thrown together, not compatible..and not working everywhere. And new standards are made up all the time, incompatible with everything else. Pretty much the same situation as linux. It's not that linux doesn't work...seeing that I type this on a linux system I must say it works pretty well.
In terms of packaging, it is distributions that would need to find a standard.
As you don't understand what packages are it's really hard to explain why a standard makes no sense for it. Let put it this way...why would anyone want to only use zip files to package incompatible data. The content of that packages is incompatible by definition....how you wrap them up doesn't matter. So why should people sit together and agree on the same wrapping for something that only works on a single system anyway? Wouldn't it make much more sense to just wrap it in what fits best for that system? It's waste of effort on something that doesn't matter.
When it comes to window managers than Gnome and KDE teams could use the bidding process to settle their differences.
And both are no window managers, What about i3, fluxbox, cinnamon, unity, blackbox, twm, openbox, fvwm, mwm....most of those have nothing in common and don't share any resources or use even he same resources. What should they agree on?
If several big projects create a standard, than most of the rest would follow it.
Ahm, no. It was tried several times and almost never worked. If someone is not happy with the standard they just create their own thing...that's the beauty of open source..everyone can do that. It happens all the time, will happen always again and in my view shouldn't be prevented at all. It what drives innovation. Examples: clang, webkit, unity, wayland, libao, mpv...