Why Linux Desktop Fragmentation is a Good Thing™

Very nice article! Now if everyone read this maybe we could avoid some of the giant flame wars and get back to agreeing on how great GNU/Linux is over all! I prefer to use Openbox myself but I can certainly see the appeal in each of the big Desktop Environments. :-)

Exactly right. Competition breeds innovation.

We've all seen how Windows has led to stagnation on the old mid 1970s XEROX WIMP for 30 odd years, when with a bit of healthy competition we could have been using an all talking, all seeing, all reading interface by now.

Once the back room human interface developers stop trying to emulate the WIMP and start innovating with today's powerful CPUs and GPUs and let the cloud do the computing, the mouse and keyboard will disappear and something else will replace the current plethora of GUI managers.

When I first saw the article title I thought this was about filesystem fragmentation.

You have forgotten something. If there was one DE it might be easier to create viruses for linux, because there would be yet another common denominator. Graphical applications tend to be more vulnerable than cli applications.

I agree, when you have freedom to work how you want, and on exactly what DE your passionate about, your chances of having an outstanding product are much greater than a robotic grind of people just going through the steps to get there piece of a meaningless project done.

And there is the Virus aspect and the innovation aspect, as someone has already pointed out a great example is Windows, little to no change up until Vista, and even that is already (Visually) something that has been seen in the GNU/Linux community for some time now.

spot on. with the different DE's everyone is catered for.

With windoze, you do things windoze way.
With mac, you do things mac way.
With Linux, you do things YOUR way.

Linux puts the personal back into PC.

I use Gnome on desktop and KDE on laptop. both same OS, but very diferent because of the DE's. windoze and mac, desktop and laptop its all the same.

keep them seperate and we all win.

This Linux Desktop discussion is a perfect example of the limits the bazaar style development has reached, mainly because going beyond the limits makes development less fun. It does not provide good design beyond that which is controlled by one person.

The problem with the desktop is not that there are too many of them, it is that they are incompatible from the developer's view. So, an application is either a KDE app, or a GNOME app, or does not use DE features at all. Things that must have a well structured layered design are a mess. Putting aside the fun of mixing both GNOME and KDE apps in one session, which makes me desire all of them were Java, just one simpler example.

There is an applet in KDE 3.5 that wants to configure network, that is, to handle my init scripts. It's funny how it attempts to do that and finally discovers that Slackware scripts are beyond its understanding. I am lucky it did no harm.

The first problem here is that there is no interface to the network configuration. The second one is that KDE does not acknowledge that and does not leave the network configuration alone. The third one is the design fault in KDE: applets are loaded unconditionally while an applicability test is necessary.

Just imagine what could be done with some discipline and Ruby being used for configuration scripts.

I know that things do improve, like having compatible clipboard in GNOME and KDE or fixing sound in the kernel, but they do so only under extreme pressure.

Desktop fragmentation is not beneficial, it is a sign of disaster. Linux is failing to switch from catch-up to leadership. Remember, this kind of failure resulted in 10+ years of economic crisis in Japan and crashed the USSR.