The Linux Desktop Mess

Oh God! Not another call for standardization! Please,... 1999 is calling and wants its tired old mantra back. I like diversity. If I didn't, I wouldn't be using Linux, I'd be using MAC or (wretch!) Windows...

Reading the comments, it looks to me like he's furiously backing off from what his article actually says.

Every once in awhile, some need to be reminded that FOSS is a natural process and evolution is its method of change.

Just like nature, we have so many different types of trees, animals, humans, etc. but guided by nature's laws and principles, so does FOSS.

Some stay the same, others change and develop, some new ones come along and others die off. That is why nature lasted for so long, so will FOSS.

Correct me if I'm wrong but the theory behind the Linux diversity is... forks and competing projects appear when there is a differing technical opinion or when individual needs are not being met. However eventually most of this should get reconciled and we should and up with one or a few dominant projects.

It seems to me the community has been forking and diverging quite a bit lately but not coming to compromises or killing off weak projects. I am hoping to see the GTK desktop environment forks come to a point where one or two of them die off.

As for the distros third parties can choose to support however many distros they want but they often support just a few. I think this is becoming self reinforcing whether or not a dominant distro is the best distro they have a lot of support by third parties, therefore users go there, and then they get a lot of support from third parties. So even if there were a million distros only a few will end up being dominant and the dominant ones will become difficult to unseat.

Projects die when developers abandon them,... Otherwise, what defines what is weak, and what is strong, anyway?! To bottom line it,... You only need a few active developers to make for a healthy project. So fork away & to your heart's content...

Quoting:Ask your Distro support channel if they are LSB-certified.

OK. "Self, are you LSB-certified?" Self:"No, now quit bugging me about stupid stuff."

Seriously though, the only time I've had problems with paid third-party software and Linux is when I had the machine integrated with Microsoft Active Directory.