[Way OT]: Re: So Long, SuSE, We Hardly Knew Ye!

[Chong Yu Meng]

On Fri, 2006-11-03 at 15:46 -0700, Collins Richey wrote:
> I have to use RH at work, and I keep a
> CentOS partition on my home system for compatibility, but I don't have
> a need for ancient software (RHEL/CentOS) and FC is frequently just
> too bleeding edge. 

I thought the US was all about diversity, the melting pot and all
that? :) One thing that has always amused me about Americans is that
they frequently assume that people from other cultures and countries
think the same way they do and use the same things that they use, in the
very same ways. 

I use FC6 on my laptop, FC5 on my servers and, over the course of many
years, have maintained and setup servers running a range of Linuxes,
from Slackware to little-known distros like Probatus Spectra and
Turbolinux. I don't use either KDE or Gnome, and instead use Xfce
because of its resemblance to CDE (it was this desktop environment that
had me enamored with UNIX way back in the days of Windows 3.1 -- I find
too many icons and doodads on the desktop distracting). Sometimes the
choice of distro and desktop environments has less to do with "what
works" or even the prevailing sentiment in newsgroups and mailing lists.
For example, Turbolinux was once a very popular distro in China, Japan
and parts of Asia where default double-byte support was crucial (not
everyone speaks English). 

Another funny thing is the proselytizing bent of most Americans. When I
was much younger, I was educated in a school that was founded by an
American missionary, and our school library had a pretty extensive
collection of books about US history and the US government system
(checks and balances, 3 branches, etc., I still remember it all).
Americans think that there can be but one world view, one "best way" of
doing things, one system of government, etc. One "best" desktop
environment and one "best" operating system are just another expression
of this. 

Well, I don't eat cereal for breakfast, don't drive to work -- and even
if I did, it would be on the "wrong" side of the road, by American
standards -- and we use the metric system here, not Imperial, and I
spell colour with a 'u', Microsoft spell-check be damned! There are 300
million Americans, but more than 1.3 billion Chinese in China. Seen in
that perspective, don't the distro wars, KDE vs Gnome, and vi vs emacs
seem just a little trivial and irrelevant ? ;)

Regards,
pascal chong