Our open source heroes are humans too

By Sam Varghese
Monday, 02 February 2009 04:54

Opinion and Analysis

A great deal is being made of the fact that Linux creator Linus Torvalds has switched from using the KDE desktop to using GNOME, something he did many months ago, and something he mentioned in passing during an interview last month.
The latest person apparently trying to cash in on the seemingly eternal mine-is-better-than-yours angle of the two desktop environments is the usually sober Glynn Moody, with the opinion that Torvalds may have switched too soon, before KDE 4 became more usable and revealed why it is a much better environment than GNOME.

But Moody at least has some merit in the arguments he advances. Not so with the folk who really went the downmarket tabloid route to beat up the whole thing - the "news from nerds" crew at Slashdot.

The interview itself, by Australian journalist Rodney Gedda, was a long and technically interesting, if somewhat repetitious, article on Computerworld but the so-called journalists at Slashdot, bad spelling, poor grammar and all, knew exactly which aspect would appeal to the testosterone-charged bunch of lemmings who constitute their immature readership.

Providing them with an interview like this to run on their site - they produce nothing worthwhile on their own - is worse than casting pearls before swine.

There was a great deal more in the interview than this one passing comment. Torvalds has strong views on many things but then he is just another user when it comes to a desktop environment. The fact that he likes one over the other at a particular moment in time means nothing - much in the same way that if Bill Gates said he liked a Honda more than a Ford it would also mean nothing.

But you can trust the muckrakers to look for the facts that create argument. Bruce Byfield, who describes himself as a computer journalist, also dipped his snout in the trough (in fact, he's done a double-dip) to provide "context." Of course, the question of providing "context" also means that one repeats ad nauseum all the old tripe and raises all the old arguments again.