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Re: De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now

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On 11 Nov 2025 04:28:44 GMT
rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

> He makes a valid point. Not only do most of the DEs follow the
> Windows 95 setup many people get confused between a distro and a DE. 
> 
> Variety is nice and all but I think it scares the hell out of Windows 
> users. The question keeps coming up 'What distro should I use?"
> Well..., are you doing anything for the next hour? Or, taking the
> other path, 'Linux Mint Cinnamon!'

The Linux community has *always* been fractious, and always will be -
between the DIY ethos, practically nil barrier to entry, general
temperament of the typical Linux developer, and the fact that
Organizing Is Complicated Because It Involves People, it's basically
inevitable. "Anyone can fork" has the natural corollary that "anyone
probably *will* fork."

To a certain extent, that's actually a Good Thing - freedom of choice
is a big part of what makes the whole enterprise worthwhile, and it's
nifty that people with strong preferences in software can rally around
a project that gives them what they want, and aren't beholden to one
party's prescribed solution. It was a beautiful and hilariously
predictable thing, f'rexample, to see GNOME Team's refusal to take the
GNOME 3 backlash into consideration lead directly to the spawning of
the MATE project in the space of about fourteen nanoseconds - or, more
recently, to see the Wayland devs blink and back down sputtering when
they finally realized that their "You Don't Need That" attitude to
feature parity with X11 in their X11 replacement was going to result in
a large portion of the freenix world telling them where to stick it.

That said, it *does* get a bit silly, and there's a noticeable tendency
for large FOSS projects in the modern era to stick around less because
the software makes a compelling case for itself than because the
organizations that develop around it give developers of a Certain
Temperament a feeling of prestige and/or power. And the whole distro/
"spin" thing oriented towards one specific DE is just pointless when
it's not like the other alternatives are even taken out of the
repository :/ Just put a list of options in the damn installer, people!
You were already doing this for GNOME/KDE by the Upper Paleolithic! 

(The article is funny, anyway, for hand-wringing about duplication of
effort, when a lack of developer effort has never, ever been the reason
why freenix UI sucks. GIMP has been the only game in town in its
particular niche of the FOSS world for nearly thirty years, and they
only *just* figured out how to do keyboard accelerators properly.)

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De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2025-11-11 04:28 +0000
  Re: De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2025-11-11 10:55 +0000
    Re: De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2025-11-11 19:14 +0000
      Re: De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now Bobbie Sellers <bliss-sf4ever@dslextreme.com> - 2025-11-11 11:47 -0800
        Re: De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-11-11 23:32 +0000
          Re: De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2025-11-12 04:03 +0000
      Re: De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2025-11-11 23:22 +0000
  Re: De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> - 2025-11-11 11:35 -0800
    Re: De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2025-11-12 04:23 +0000
  Re: De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> - 2025-11-12 00:58 +0000
    Re: De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2025-11-12 03:52 +0000

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