Linux distro/desktop competition

[John Chambers]

Jerry Feldman wrote:
| We come down to the difference between political structures.
| Dictatorships can be much more efficient. "Mussolini made the trains
| run on time" in Italy. Democratic societies are much less efficiant,
| but we all have a lot of choices.=20

Actually, historians have thoroughly debunked the "Mussolini made the
trains run on time" myth.  During his tenure, the Italians trains had
an atrociously bad on-time record. And, more generally, they've shown
that  dictatorships  (including  those  in  corporations)  tend to be
rather inefficient.  The main reason  is  that  the  decision  makers
rarely  understand  (or  care  about)  the  low-level issues, and the
people who do are afraid to speak  up  or  take  actions  to  improve
problem situations.  If you want efficiency, you give the people with
expertise the power to make and implement their  own  decisions,  and
the  power  structure  must  support  those decisions.  This tends to
happen automatically in democracies and other decentralized  systems,
which is why they are usually more efficient.

We even have a special case of this within the linux community,  with
the  Gentoo  and  Slackware distros generally producing somewhat more
efficient systems than the others. The reasons are fairly obvious and
well  known:  It  takes a bit of expertise and labor to install those
distros.  And the efficiency gains are small enough that  it  can  be
worthwhile  to  save  human  time  by just going with one of the more
packaged distros.  This goes along with the frequent observation that
it takes work to maintain a democratic political system.


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