| Follow @jrssnet
West Columbia
I'm a mercenary systems administrator located in Columbia, SC. My first real hands-on experience with open source software was running Apache on FreeBSD webservers in the late 90s and early 2000s. Since then, I moved on to Samba, BIND, qmail, postfix, and anything and everything else that grabbed my attention. I currently support Windows, FreeBSD, Debian, and Ubuntu workstations and servers doing just about everything that you can possibly do with any or all of them. RAH said it best - specialization is for insects!
Authored Comments
You're forgetting Unity, and LXDE, and XFCE, and Awesome, and Enlightenment, and... =)
I'm not really sure I can agree with your premise though, to be honest. It's one I hear a lot, but I think the fact that competition can exist within the framework of the operating system is a good thing, not a bad thing.
I loved Gnome 2.x, but Gnome3 leaves me cold. If "everything was all one window manager", I'd have been locked into Gnome3 just as Windows users are locked into the newer UI elements of post-Vista Windows (and Office!) whether they like them or not.
As things stand, I still miss Gnome2 - but I'm much happier with LXDE than I am with either Gnome3 or KDE (or Unity).
I'm just not so sure that forcibly merging KDE and Gnome (and Unity, and LXDE, and XFCE, and...)'s developers all into one team would really result in any kind of qualitative improvement. =)
And MS proves that there only being one alternative doesn't prevent the owners from making noxious changes to the UI... really, I think it's entirely the opposite.
I think the inconsistency of window managers in general has more to do with their relationship of complexity-to-funding than anything else. Most of the software I'd think of as shining beacons to OSS software quality - Apache, Postfix, nginx - are VASTLY less complex than a window manager, and I believe (I could be proven wrong; got figures?) get less corporate and/or DARPA funding as well.