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Wasted Creativity in the GNU/Linux Distribution Diversity

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Re: Wasted Creativity in the GNU/Linux Distribution Diversity

#5

Post by dansman805 »

On one hand, time and effort is wasted doing the same thing 100 times with slight differences rather than just working on the same thing. But on the other hand, in my opinion these differences are very important. For example, you listed that only a few desktop environments are necessary. While that may be true for the vast majority of Linux users, the more fringe desktop environments/window managers are great. For example, I use i3wm daily and it's a pleasure to use. While some of the DEs listed in the article may have some tiling, the WMs designed specifically for tiling do it better (in my opinion). That's the glorious thing about there being many tools that do ostensibly the same thing, you can almost always find a tool that fits your niche use case.

Re: Wasted Creativity in the GNU/Linux Distribution Diversity

#6

Post by theonemind »

Well, perhaps so, but Linus, regarding Linux (although I think he meant mostly the kernel), said,

"I'm deadly serious: we humans have never been able to replicate something more complicated than what we ourselves are, yet natural selection did it without even thinking. Don't underestimate the power of survival of the fittest. And don't ever make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit."

In that light, this strikes me like complaining that we have too many kinds of beetles. Linux distributions just work this way.

Re: Wasted Creativity in the GNU/Linux Distribution Diversity

#7

Post by gnuarch »

dansman805 wrote: post #5

On one hand, time and effort is wasted doing the same thing 100 times with slight differences rather than just working on the same thing. But on the other hand, in my opinion these differences are very important. For example, you listed that only a few desktop environments are necessary. While that may be true for the vast majority of Linux users, the more fringe desktop environments/window managers are great. For ex…

Good point, at least i3 or sway don't do their own distributions – afaik.
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