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Who cares? Let's just pick one - any - and standardise on that one so we can maybe move towards a consistent look and feel. They're all sort of the same; just d
by superflyguy 8y ago
Who cares? Let's just pick one - any - and standardise on that one so we can maybe move towards a consistent look and feel. They're all sort of the same; just different enough to be annoying and frighten any occasional/non-technical is away. Gnome is good enough? That'll do, let's use that then.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- growse 8y ago> They're all sort of the same I think the poster's point is that they're not. One has apparently been well designed to be able to scale to new features, and the other one appears not to have been.
- Barrin92 8y agoThere seems to be a lot of quasi-religious elements in the debate. Everybody thinks that one is well designed but can't strongly articulate why, and someone else believes the opposite to be true. Linus has often pointed out the huge pain that the fragmentation of the ecosystem causes that is often uncritically identified as a choice. Yes, converging towards standards is almost always a pain point for someone, but the ecosystem overall benefits from having much less ground to cover. And honestly, objectively almost any of the large mature DE's seems to be feature rich enough to use as a starting point.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- emn13 8y agoI don't use linux at all anymore as a DE, but in a few jobs I did, using both (and for a while canonicals ill-fated WM), and the idea that gnome appears less flexible, slower, and just generally worse in almost all ways was usually (though not always) appeared to be the case. Maybe KDE was a little too flexible for my tastes, but it sure worked better (most of the time - not always). I also remember thinking - why the heck is gnome the default? Haven't used linux as a DE for a few years now though, so no idea what the current status is...
- andrey_utkin 8y agoDiversity has a value in stability of the ecosystem. Converge to a monoculture which brings highest short-term gains, and later it all can stagnate or even collapse for some single reason. See "banana monoculture".
- superflyguy 8y agoSorry, what's going to collapse if all Linux users have the same visual interface? Stagnate? Like a shell, you mean?
- andrey_utkin 8y agoWhat if all Linux users have exclusively MySQL (imagine there's no SQLite, no PostgreSQL), and then it gets bought by Oracle?
- Barrin92 8y agoIt's not clear to me that consolidation here actually does reduce diversity in a meaningful sense of the term. Many choices in the Linux world are not so often choices between truly different things, but between superficially different spins on the same thing. For example, many distros only really differ from their parent in theming, replicated but differently named applications and so forth, which could all be offered in one distribution with less workload, but the same degree of genuine choice. Same is true for DE's I think. Many of the things that differentiates DE's could probably be offered as configuration within one DE, with less workload but no or very little reduction in diversity.
- alxlaz 8y ago> Many of the things that differentiates DE's could probably be offered as configuration within one DE If you want to get flamed to death, mention the word "configuration" on a Gnome mailing list. There are people who think that things could just be configuration options, and then there are people who insist that the default configuration should be right, and that too much configuration is detrimental to the user experience (because it's hard/complex/time-consuming) and to development time (if you have two sets of two configuration options, that means you have four configuration to tests, and so on). It's not like these folks don't have a point, either.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- superflyguy 8y agoThen the poster is wrong. They are very much all sort of the same.
- mbowcutt 8y agoPeople like options, especially the Linux/FOSS people. You could come to a consensus about something but it'll only go so far until some developer decides to fork it and make their own project :)
- Skunkleton 8y agoTech people like options. It seems like everyone else wants it to just work well enough, and work out of the box.
- simion314 8y agoIf Windows were open source I bet you would have people forking Win7 or WinXP and many non tech people use the familiar thing then be forced to use the new shiny thing some designer thinks is best.
- sanbor 8y agoEven developers likes to focus on their work and not why their computer doesn't start again after being suspended. How many developers uses Macs? I have meet sysadmins that uses Time Machine instead of a more customizable back up system. Even Miguel De Icaza, the co-author of Gnome, switched to Mac because "it just works".
- superflyguy 8y agoI'm a "tech person".
- azurezyq 8y agoCommunity likes options, but enterprises not. Yet another DE means extra set of conformance tests, bugs to fix, look-and-feels, supporting pages. These all mean money but your customers may not even care about this feature. So let's say GNU/Linux can use whatever DE and it will always be. But RHEL is just a business product derived from it, with a selected "blessed" packages. There're no conflicts.
- asknthrow 8y ago640K ought to be enough for anyone.
- tomhoward 8y agoDebunked: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/operating-systems/the--640k--quote-won-t-go-away----but-did-gates-really-say-it-.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/operating-syst...
- toyg 8y agoIf you go one step further, who cares about kernels and shells? Let's just standardise on one (NT) so we can maybe move towards actually getting work done. Windows is good enough? That'll do, let's use that then. /s