TheDesktopIsWorthAThousand
Forks™

Is it Debian? Is it a Ferret? Does it go Eee in the night?

One day, Walmart will devote lanes and lanes of shelving in the basement of their very biggest hypermarket offering every Linux desktop your little heart could desire. Educational? Scientific? Live CD? Dwarf? Kayoed? Hurd (not quite yet)?

Strawberry? Chocolate? Mint? Shit brown? Purple bruising?

In one of those awkward blips of history, Walmart actually tried this out (only with a single fork, mind), and they don’t do it any more.

Well, there just aren’t enough forks out there, are there? Bring me monkey aleph null minus one, and we shall create the fork to end all forks!

In case anybody is interested, the original phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” is almost certainly early 20th century American in origin, and actually makes sense. If you’re dealing with a commercial advertisement, that is. Not if you’re dealing with a desktop.

Fact is, people want a single desktop. They don’t want to play around with re-skinning and moving buttons and toolbars around. They don’t want to guess which feature works on this one, and which won’t work on the next upgrade.

Basically, people don’t care. People choose baseball teams and they choose car models and they even choose stupid names for their kids. Desktops just aren’t that much of an issue, as long as they work.

As far as 99% of the population is concerned, “Downstream” is where you’re just about to drop over the Niagara Falls.