Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: John Ames Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc Subject: Re: De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2025 11:35:05 -0800 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 47 Message-ID: <20251111113505.00001a8a@gmail.com> References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2025 19:35:13 +0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="0d689427e2ba8791c27c0b795ea68e63"; logging-data="1022766"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX19sG5s3HwhEqi3qXCHm+UTXDb86yv8lS+E=" Cancel-Lock: sha1:IHe0h8DZKlRY4hnLsdpW8I45uUA= X-Newsreader: Claws Mail 4.3.0 (GTK 3.24.42; x86_64-w64-mingw32) Xref: csiph.com comp.os.linux.misc:77334 On 11 Nov 2025 04:28:44 GMT rbowman 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.)