About the students I had in my mind: of course I never thought about computer science students, they should be able to figure out there problem themselves. But I have a set of example use cases in my mind (friends, etc.) which I use to check if Linux can be useful for them or not.
First:
a) A student who studies central Asia cultural development. He uses several helpful tools (most often tools for specific languages not supported by any OS out there) mostly put together by other central Asia culture students who happened to have few bits of computer knowledge. Such a niche software even has too few users as you could integrate into every repository. Still, the software does its job. But now even if the developer would be able to port his program to Linux, there would be *no* way to spread it to all the other users as long as they do not agree on one distribution.
b) Students are people who try new things. I have several friends who have only limited computer knowledge but love to just surf around web pages and download and install new software. There are big web databases for Linux software (kde-apps, gnomefiles, etc.) - but there is again no way at all to simply point and click. Try to find only half of the gnomefiles and kde-apps applications in Debian, it would not work.
c) Geology students using specific applications - even if the isv would like to support Linux, again which distribution should it choose? Yes, there is LSB RPM, but everyone hates it (ask Fedora guys about LSB RPM, and you will be unpleasantly surprised).
Of course, CNR.com might come to the rescue - I hope more for the OpenSuse attempt with their open build server. Still not where it should be, but it might reach that goal sometime, and since its open companies (isvs or companies offering services to isvs) themselves could use it.
Anyhow, about the common code base, that is easy to answer: Qt. Looks perfect everywhere :)
About the students I had in my mind: of course I never thought about computer science students, they should be able to figure out there problem themselves. But I have a set of example use cases in my mind (friends, etc.) which I use to check if Linux can be useful for them or not.
First:
a) A student who studies central Asia cultural development. He uses several helpful tools (most often tools for specific languages not supported by any OS out there) mostly put together by other central Asia culture students who happened to have few bits of computer knowledge. Such a niche software even has too few users as you could integrate into every repository. Still, the software does its job. But now even if the developer would be able to port his program to Linux, there would be *no* way to spread it to all the other users as long as they do not agree on one distribution.
b) Students are people who try new things. I have several friends who have only limited computer knowledge but love to just surf around web pages and download and install new software. There are big web databases for Linux software (kde-apps, gnomefiles, etc.) - but there is again no way at all to simply point and click. Try to find only half of the gnomefiles and kde-apps applications in Debian, it would not work.
c) Geology students using specific applications - even if the isv would like to support Linux, again which distribution should it choose? Yes, there is LSB RPM, but everyone hates it (ask Fedora guys about LSB RPM, and you will be unpleasantly surprised).
Of course, CNR.com might come to the rescue - I hope more for the OpenSuse attempt with their open build server. Still not where it should be, but it might reach that goal sometime, and since its open companies (isvs or companies offering services to isvs) themselves could use it.
Anyhow, about the common code base, that is easy to answer: Qt. Looks perfect everywhere :)