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Diversity 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 coll

Diversity 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 ago
Sorry, what's going to collapse if all Linux users have the same visual interface? Stagnate? Like a shell, you mean?
- andrey_utkin 8y ago
  What if all Linux users have exclusively MySQL (imagine there's no SQLite, no PostgreSQL), and then it gets bought by Oracle?
Barrin92 8y ago
It'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.
- newacctjhro 8y ago
  > 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. Perhaps if this DE is KDE. Gnome devs aren't interested in a configurable DE.

superflyguy 8y ago

Sorry, what's going to collapse if all Linux users have the same visual interface? Stagnate? Like a shell, you mean?

andrey_utkin 8y ago
What if all Linux users have exclusively MySQL (imagine there's no SQLite, no PostgreSQL), and then it gets bought by Oracle?

Barrin92 8y ago

It'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.
newacctjhro 8y ago
> 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. Perhaps if this DE is KDE. Gnome devs aren't interested in a configurable DE.