Attempts to unify Linux and other free Unix? It's such a pain when you don't know what distribution to choose. It's such a waste of time and effort for developers to port stuff from one distribution to another. It makes Linux/Unix more complicated (and scary) than it should be. While I know there are certain reasons why the situation became the way it is now, I wonder if anyone has ever thought of reunifying the worlds of Linux and other (free) Unix? **This is still a question** : Have there been any (failed) attempts to unify Linux/Unix?

If you would unify the distributions system configuration tools and general behavior there would be no need for different distributions.

An advantage would be to define some binary interface for the applications. The The Linux Standard Base Workgroup tries to define some.

Here is a list of the specifications which are the base of some iso standards: LSB Specs