The real, BIG, only war is *NIX vs Windows; the other options are just internal disputes

Unix? Windows? If all your code is portable Perl, and everything else you do is in Emacs, Mozilla, or the Gimp, what difference does it make? The operating system is a commodity. I switched from Win9x to Linux because I was tired of the daily crashing, but if I'd been using WinXP (which wasn't available yet at the time) I might not have needed to switch. If BeOS had had certain key features (notably, the ability to globally set colour preferences and have all GUI apps follow them) I might still be using that.

Don't get me wrong; I like playing with different OSes, and Unix is cool and all that, but I don't think which OS you use is really the critical issue (at least, on the desktop; servers are another matter). The key point is that with cross-platform apps it doesn't *matter* which OS you use; you're free to switch on a whim, try out a different OS for a week or a month, then if you change your mind switch back or try another...

So the long and short of it is that I'm not interested in having a holy war over which OS to use. And before you start talking about OS monopolies locking everybody in, that wouldn't happen if we all used file formats that are either used by many different apps (e.g., png, zip) or by cross-platform apps (e.g., xcf, sxw). That holds true regardless of platform, and I'm no more interested in single-app data formats used by *nix-only apps than the ones for Win-only apps. (This is one reason the recent news about KOffice is so great; I personally was unwilling to use KOffice when it had its own file formats, because the data would be inaccessible on other platforms. Once they switch to the OO.o formats, the data will be accessible and I can consider KOffice as a viable option.)

Windows versus Unix? Bah, that's a distraction, nothing more. The real war is cross-platform versus locked-in.

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