[lvncelot]

On the one hand, I agree. I've spent whole days just checking out software alternatives, booting new distros, DEs, hosting webapps, just to see what they were like, and it's always great fun.

On the other hand it can hurt - for example I'd like to have my main workstation running mainly one gui framework. (Or at least, most of the software). But the KDE/GTK split makes the most popular and sensible software to use for most cases pretty much evenly distributed between those two. (Though this is obviously not a major issue, just an example).