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West Columbia
I'm a mercenary systems administrator located in Columbia, SC. My first real hands-on experience with open source software was running Apache on FreeBSD webservers in the late 90s and early 2000s. Since then, I moved on to Samba, BIND, qmail, postfix, and anything and everything else that grabbed my attention. I currently support Windows, FreeBSD, Debian, and Ubuntu workstations and servers doing just about everything that you can possibly do with any or all of them. RAH said it best - specialization is for insects!
Authored Comments
How about "I'm not sure?"
I don't really do much development myself, and when I do, it's almost never development using a GUI outside a web browser. So I don't feel very comfortable making any kind of blanket proclamation that you're right or wrong here.
BUT, I can't think of many (if any) applications I've personally seen or used that did work right under Gnome but were broken under KDE or Unity or LXDE, so I'm not really sure it's applicable either.
Ultimately I think the window manager is a red herring compared to the distros themselves; splitting things up into distros (and window managers) ultimately means that it's harder for the original developer to directly support the end user; it winds up being a case of the original developer primarily developing while the distro maintainers do "support" to one degree or another.
It's more *complicated* that way, but I'm not sure that means "worse". Going back to the always-hated car analogies, nobody from the 50's would have wanted to get stuck maintaining a vehicle from this decade - but that doesn't mean we'd all be better off returning to 50s-era cars.
Clarifying what I mean by "support" - the developer of, say, an OSS game can't really rely on the user already having, say, libmikmod for audio, or libmikmod having the same packagename across all possible distributions.
So if his game gets picked up by a maintainer in the Ubuntu repos, the Ubuntu maintainer will see that dependency and mark it versus the correct package, compile it all, and make sure it all works. This puts the onus for "make it work when you install it" on the distro, not on the original vendor.
I don't think that's a bad thing, though.