I was reading a post over at the Linux Mint Blog and found that I’m a bit behind on my Linux news. I’ve never heard of LXDE. Now my desktop environment of choice is Gnome, usually. I also like XFCE, but Gnome has all the features and rarely lets me down. I like the variety in Linux so I was glad to see yet another desktop environment.
LXDE seems to be geared toward netbooks and other cloud-client computers. Linux has many light-weight desktop environments, and even though I like variety, sometimes I wish that they would all come together and work together.
This leads me to a pitfall of open source. It’s also an advantage. Those are complete contradictions, but there’s really no other way to explain it. I lean more toward the advantage side of things but sometimes I wonder if the different projects could be merged as much as they are split.
It seems that it’s perfectly logical for developers to split from a project and create a fork, but rarely do two projects merge to form a super project. Perhaps open source in general needs more merging to balance out the massive amounts of forks….just a thought.