Occasionally you’ll find some criticism of Linux in the direction of “duplication” of efforts are wasted efforts. A good fraction of the time I don’t agree with what is considered duplications and it turns out it doesn’t matter if efforts are duplicated or not. It’s about freedom so if 20 people choose to write the exact same piece of software they are completely free to do so. The only time I do really care about duplication is when its something that I am working on, because I personally would rather contribute or write something unique in the OSS world.

Two benefits of having software choices are:
1. Similar applications / OSs / tools will have different features and feels. Pouring all efforts into a single project could lead to poor usability due to number of features and conflicting goals.
2. When things break, as they will always do from time to time, you can switch to alternatives and wait out the problems.

If your primarily concerned with productivity, know of and how to use various software, and use a “cutting edge” distro like Gentoo #2 has a nice glow.

Just yesterday I upgraded my profile, emerged my world, and had Gnome blow up in a wild display of sparks: a missing panel, broken icons, a dead mouse, and a message about lack of communications with the message bus (dbus). This was very annoying and I spent a few minutes trying to fix it. In the end, however, I just ditched it. I like fluxbox and was interested to give KDE a try (it had been a few years since I’ve last used it). So I had two great choices. I used fluxbox to keep working while I emerged KDE and when KDE was done toasting I plopped it on my plate, spread some jam, and continued to work away. I found out that I still don’t really like the feel of KDE, however, it will be just fine for me to use until the Gnome problem works its self out (as so often happens with Gentoo) or until I have some spare time to dive deeper into and fix the problems. Additionally I will probably find some more stuff I like, in KDE, that I would have never known about before. One cool thing that I have discovered is that it supports multiple monitors really well (setting multiple wallpapers and app transparency previews on each of the monitors wallpapers…. cool).

The same holds at the OS level. If you really screw up and your whole box becomes unbootable, throw in the live OS of your choice, mount your data, and continue to be productive until you have a chance to fix the problems.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 31st, 2006 at 3:26 pm and is filed under Linux, Scott. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.