Debian: contempt for "end user" values has to stop!"

[Derek Broughton]

Liam Proven wrote:

> To maliciously mutate an old saying, Mohammed has been coming to the
> mountain for a generation and his feet are tired. It's time for the
> mountain to come to Mohammed.
> 
> Ubuntu is making headway. Not a huge amount, but some. Most of the
> other spinoffs are not, they're just people trying to make things work
> the way *they* want, with no real consideration of what anyone else
> wants.

And frankly, if that's the way you feel, you _shouldn't_ be using a Linux 
distro.  That's evolutionary development for you.

> Which is fine so long as they don't derail the main effort.
> Personally,  I think Kubuntu/Xubuntu/etc. just distract from the main
> project, waste time and effort and pull people away from the main
> event. But it's a free world, if that's what people want, fine.

How do they pull anyone away from the "main event" - they're developers who 
don't want _anything_ to do with Gnome.  If somehow Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc, 
were to disappear today, don't expect that many - if any - of the people 
working on them would choose to put their effort into the mainline Ubuntu.

> They just need to realise that they /are/ harming the effort to
> displace proprietary software. As Caesar allegedly said of Gaul, 2000
> years ago, /Divide et impera/: divide and conquer.

No, they don't need to realize that at all.  imo, it's _we_ divide, and _we_ 
conquer, because the sum is more than the whole of its parts...
 
> Linux will never displace Windows so long as there are 200 versions of
> it battling for people's attention.

And _nobody_ really cares - notwithstanding Ubuntu Bug #1.

> But still, the blog post had a good point. What matters is making
> something that works well for its users. Programmers' preferences for
> a certain language, or for not having overlapping fonts, should be
> subsidiary to this.

Why?  If I'm going to develop, I'm going to do it in a language _I'm_ 
comfortable with.  Even in a commercial setup, that's true.
-- 
derek