Please not another rewrite! 1.6 to 1.7 took 12 years!!!

It did not help that instead of using other common libraries they had implemented their own from scratch (EFL).

What E needs is to work on stability: It is the only desktop environment that crashes. Sure it is very fast and seamless at restarting right away, but it shouldn't crash in the first place!

Grab popcorn, go to one of the systemd-related stories and watch them tear each other to pieces.

Who said /. is not entertaining?

Linux's primary market share is on servers. Thus the distributions should focus on server usage first and desktop users second. There are hardly any of the later when compared with a former.

If you want to run Linux on a desktop, you should jump through extra hoops to install systemd on your machine, because you are a minority. In practice, there should be different distribution based on the server and desktop.

Alas this will cause more fragmentation, but as we spoke about this before, some people do not see this as a problem.

Ah! That is the first insightful reply and one I agree with.

Indeed, you are being judged by the clothes you wear. This is something I had to learn back in high school when I had to go for my first job interview. It is all about the first impression and regardless of what you know, it will be formed before you even speak. It is tragic that regardless of what you know, it is how you look like that makes the most difference :-(.

Alas, that is human nature and there is no changing that. At some point one has to give up on idealism and just accept that certain realities of society are just not-nogotiable. I guess developers are one unique group that can get away with since they can work from home and avoid seeing clients.

Thank you for your explanation.

It puzzles me because it is quite petty (You wear one additional piece of clothing over the usual), this aversion is quite widespread among developers and from my interactions among several white-colar industries it is only in IT that it is present.

Hence I find it odd... Especially since they are willing to sacrifice money to get around this requirement.

This has always puzzled me why some developers list this as a negative. What is wrong with wearing a suit? Every professional workplace has an expectation of a formal atire. What is wrong with requiring suits over the usual office shirts and pants?

There is certanly a lot of hate directed at COBOL. However, since if it is still being used, then it still has some capability that is not available in other solutions. Also looking at the wikipedia, the language keeps being updated (COBOL 2014 standard is out for example) and supports object-oriented methodology.

COBOL is one language that I haven't encountered. Perhaps it would be insightful if someone can explain why there is so much animosity towards this technology.

Amen brother!

It is especially bad in MMORPGs. Worst abuse I ever heard was by guild leaders towards other members during raids. It seems being put in some virtual position of authority just brings out the worst in people.

Damn that must suck. I heard it said that life in the millitary is 95% boredom and 5% sheer terror.

Do you have the ability to have a local LAN going? There must still be some games out there that you can play with your buddies on the ship.

One enjoys EVE Online if and only if he/she also enjoys spreadsheets.

Really, it is Excel with double-clicking to move around!

Yes it did. It was poor and nowhere near as good as for example Morrowind, but it was stil there.

Very true. I have encountered similar situation many times. No idea why you are modded to -1.

However the scenario is a failure of the initial admin not the software. Quite often they are young, inexperienced, "Open source is the best for everything" junior who is often a friend or a relative of someone in the company. This is because those small businesses are trying to save money on the IT and so they don't want to spend money on a professional consultant. Some inexperienced kid will make just as much of a unmaintainable mess with Windows servers.

  A properly setup system with documentation and training for the user will work just fine regardless of what OS is in use.

I respectfully disagree. Fragmentation impacts both developers and the end users.

Developers:
There are a finite pool of people that have the knowledge to improve/write software. That group is further divided down into those that have the time and motivation to contribute to the open-source software. From there they are further divided among the competing projects that are doing the same thing. Example: GNOME 3 vs Cinnamon vs MATE vs KDE vs Trinity. Debian vs Red Hat vs Arch vs Suse vs Slackware. Therefore this fragmentation needlessly reduces the pool of available contributors.

Also, any software package needs to be maintained for so many different configurations. A very good example is the package management: Debian, Red Hat, Gentoo, Slackware each have their own package format. This fragmentation adds more boring workload on the maintainers. Now that we will have distributions with or without systemd, it means that if the software deals with the area affected, TWO versions need to be developed! Doing something twice is again wasted effort.

End User:
Fragmentation adversely affects the user because the software he/she needs may not be available for the configuration that it being used. It is hard to come up with example for systemd since it is such a system-level system. Much easier to use an example of window-manager fragmentation: A certain package may look terrible on the one that the user chose.

Even if the software is available, documentation may be only written for another distribution.

Finally, the user needs to choose a distribution to start with. The choice is literally overwhelming. Have a look at this timeline: Distribution Timeline. Now imagine it exploding even further into systemd using/rejecting versions. That much amount of choice is paralyzing.

In the end, fragmentation just wastes resources on doing the same things more than once. It is necessary if the constrain is quite severe, but right now in the community forks happen over something as trivial as library versions or the visual look!

Great! That is all we need. More fragmentation in the community! As if choosing a distro wasn't confusing enough as it is for newcomers!

THIS is the reason why Linux will never be a mainstream desktop.

The damage will already be done though. And unfortunately the incident will encourage all countries without nuclear weapons to seek to arm themselves, seeing how NATO was unable to prevent nuclear aggression.