Sharing Apps Between Different Distributions

[Donald Darden]

Years ago, as Microsoft released new OSes, including 95, 98, 98SE, NE, and NT, and disk drive space was at a premium, you might want to install a new OS and be able to reuse the same Apps under it, assuming that the designated App would run under that OS as well.  Or at least shared the same files, such as .DOC and .TXT files created under each OS.

The trouble was, that because of the key rold that the Registry played, that each App had to be reinstalled separately under the individual OSes in order to work.  And of course the problem of not being able to repair Windows adequately without clobbering installed applications is still with us.
Heck, the adoption of NT (now 2K/XP/Vista) also forced us to pretty much accept a new file system as well, NTFS, which is not backward compatable with Windows 9x/Me.

But it seems that the various Linux distributions are more closely akin to each other than the various versionns of Windows are.  They are all pretty much able to accept similar packages, abet you might have to convert packages from one format to another, and they are also able to work with all manner of file systems, including FAT and NTFS volumes.

So the question that comes to mind is, why not be able to share the same applications from within the different distributions>  Why have the same exact packages installed under multiple versions of Linux, each having to be upgraded separately, and only when you have booted up into that particullar implementation?  After all, Linux provides the ability to create links, but the task of identifying all the duplications between two or more distributions and providing links automatically would be a big one, and you probably would want the process to eliminate the duplicates automatically at the same time.

It's just a thought that keeps coming to mind, and I finally decided to bring it up online.