Ahh Mr Parker... how ever did you realise I had you in mind when I typed it?
Variety is the spice of life, and with out the variety, there's not a whole lot of point in having anything, the 'different' programs often use different toolkits, had different origionating ideas, and have different goals. The developers may well have started on the code at the same time, some of the projects may be forks of other projects (usually due to political arguments between groups of people, see BSDs variants for an example).
That gives it all its flavour. But Variety for Varietys sake? Im not saying the programs shouldnt have the ability to produce completly different output or performance results. Im suggesting that one program should be adaptable [through the use of options] to produce that variety.
Next you'll do the "why doesn't everyone use just one Desktop Environment" and "Why don't we all use the same distribution", there's reasons for everything.
Desktop envrioment was something I had in mind - whilst I understand that different people want to have different look and feel to their desktop enviroments, and indeed have completly different demands to them, which is possibly a more important issue for some, the basic usage of a desktop envrioment is the same. With X, the system was designed to allow the use of different window mangers and so on inside of the same system, so the potential of cross-compatable code would (and is) high.
Anyways - you already know this, you're just being obtuse again and looking for responses ;)
Yup. I'm very interested in what other people think.
(Oh, and you could think of it *this* way, if it was such a brilliant idea to throw all your eggs in one basket, how comes a lot of the more useful software out there for windows *isn't* written by microsoft?
Erm, Linus dosnt sit down and write X does he? or fix patches on Gaim? Whats your point about who writes it? My point about Windows was that the Operating system provider (Microsoft) also provide a development kit that allows a range of languages and a range of efficiencies for the development of applications for their operating system. Whilst some distributions do similar things, I dont get the same sort of feel for their compatable systems (by this I mean debian have a package which lets you make debian packages dont they? and similar tools are availible, but none of these tools seem to be like the Microsoft equivilant (which whilst dont allow you to be... adaptable ie everyone has the same toolsets, they do interface with each other on a very basic level).
There are as many different projects out there as developers with different mind sets and goals, there's a lot of compromise put in to most designs, you can either be extremely secure, or extremely flexible, or extremely simple to use (but fucks up badly when you want it to do something complex), I don't think I've yet come across anything that covers all three, you can get some very nice balances in the middle, and that's why you have so many forks/projects that seem the same.
But wouldnt it be better to create one program which did take all those mindsets and goals, all that experience and made a brillant adaptable progam? Sure there are *some* open source programs which do allow that level of genericiy (usually through the use of some core system and a bunch of plug-in modules such as Apache and Gaim.
<addin>
The original link was to posters for Microsoft's security concerns. The actual posters are to promote users ideas about security and suggest that you visit http://www.microsoft.com/security/protect/ which I presume will try to make sure that your computer has both recent patch updates and suggests using Anti-Virus software.
The final thing I would like to ask is do people using Linux take note of Linux virus's OR the potential that their servers might be transfering Windows virus's to other computers? If you have Windows users who are uploading files, might you have virus infected files on your webservers or email servers?
J
<personal note>
Anyways - I wasn't actually in the mood for a rant. I have bad head.
Get better. Got the cold eveyones got? Im currently hiding from foul mood headchy kaz whilst passing her tea & rugs on the end of a long stick.
J