| I agree and I'll leverage your comment to rant a bit so please forgive me :) It's the old CADT [0] monster still at work. Windows desktop is the same old explorer shell which has been there since 1995? Only addition is dwm, which provides the modern graphical facilities. And Windows team has been constantly improving this same codebase for 20 years now. While on the FOSS side, desktop developers are busy with the sisyphean task of rewriting or porting desktop shells and base applications again and again. OH, they've released a new version of graphics toolkit and the old one is deprecated. We must port the desktop now. Oh we also have to port all the applications now. Some applications were so hard to port that we've abondoned them and rewrite them instead. Actually, why don't we also rewrite the desktop shell while we're at it? Promise it'll worth it. We ported old apps but they're not consistent with the new ux paradigms of the new desktop so we'll rewrite them also... And just few years later when things start to calm down, there's a new release of graphic toolkit which will eventually deprecate the old version, ... oh not again. Notice that I'm not talking about fragmentation or lack of resources. I'm glad we have more than one major DE, and I don't think more resources or less fragmentation would change anything regarding the situation above. Even with lack of resources, linux desktops had long long time to create really high quality products but they can't, because the ground below them is always shaking. Windows team on the other hand has been vetting, fixing, improving the same codebase for 20 years. They don't change the underlying toolkit every 5 year. They don't rewrite basic applications or port them to new libraries over and over (except new metro things, but they're seperate so my point still stands). Imagine what we would have now, if Gnome devs continued to polish and improve Gnome 2 and KDE devs continued to polish and improve KDE 3, just by using the same resources they've poured into Gnome 3 and KDE 4/Plasma 5 and their applications, respectively. Again I'll emphasize, I'm grateful for the efforts that went into linux DE's, and I don't blame their developers for shit they have to deal with (although some are partly responsible for it) That was a long rant and thanks for listening. [0] http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html |
Well, as far as I can tell, lots of Linux people are hipstery special little snowflakes and fork things because some small thing isn't exactly as they want it, and that's where most of the fragmentation comes from.
Assuming that's largely accurate, why would it not be a problem?
What if we had, say, three major Linux distros instead of dozens of half-assed ones? How many tinkerer-distros does the world need? -As many as it takes to prevent Linux from ever conquering the desktop, it seems.
But seriously.. Please stop.