Re: Fedora proposing to remove X11 Gnome

On 2025-04-27, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Sun, 27 Apr 2025 07:31:00 -0000 (UTC), Borax Man wrote:
>

I think many people just have this belief that things
should be changed, reinvented.

>
It’s not just some “belief”. What happens in the Open Source world is,
somebody comes along and shows us a way that is provably better. And so,
inevitably, the old ways get abandoned in favour of the new.
>
Tradition is a strong brake on this (you yourself are an obvious example),
but in a competitive environment, the new, superior way wins out, sooner
or later.

Thanks to "Open Source" (I'll say free software), we still have NNTP
servers, we still have command line tools, we still have new tools
utilising the "unix way".  We can still pipe the output of AWK through
SORT and into an email program to send to someone.

Tools like "jq", "dmenu", "fzf" and "pass", I could find many others,
which utilise the "Unix philosophy", the so called "old ways", and are
valuable in the modern day.  The free software world not only creates
new solutions, it keeps alive what used to work as well.  In the
commercial, proprietary world, that is where the "old ways" are
abandoned.

There is a reason that Windows has a Linux subsystem.  There is a reason
for Powershell.  I've been around enough to see "new" solutions which
are just reinventions of what had been done before.  There is no static
vision of where the future is going.

Everyone thought "The CLI is DEAD!", and it functionally dissapeared
from Windows (it never really had much back in the 90s, early 2000s),
only to come back.  The more things change, the more the stay the same.

The idea that Tradition is a brake is wrong.  Tradition often is the
result of cumulative experience, knowledge, trial and error.  Its what
people worked out as solutions.  All too often, people run into trouble
because the fail to understand there is a reason that things are the way
they are.