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I wasn't really talking about the *exact* issues the article mentions... More about how to deal with some of those "too many ways to do something - and in the end, some thing actually don't work at all" issues.
The following list is not a rant or complaint, it's just things that I've stumbled across several times and had to admit that the lack of convergence there.
Examples: *) alsa, jack, oss, esd, pulse, arts, ... Audio works for app#1, but not for app#2, maybe for app#3, etc... So far it's ok if you just want to play music, but if you start making or recording music... wohooo! (I hope that esd, oss and arts become extinct)
*) gconf: good idea, but only for gnome-apps
*) gnome-apps in KDE (and vice versa): ouch. e.g. File associations in Thunderbird running in KDE.
*) Printer settings Ever had to explain someone why there are several different printing dialogs, depending on which application you use for printing? (OpenOffice: gnome printing, Gwenview: KDE, Inkscape: /dev/lp0 ?)
- - Screen/graphic settings: Ever had to setup something like "dual screen" or change the refresh rate to a reasonable value? Which tool did you use, or did you manually edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf? Did your keyboard layout suddenly change to US afterwards, for no real reason?
- - Language settings: How many places and ways do you know to configure your keyboard layout ? :) Ever plugged an NTFS formatted disk with umlauts on en_US.UTF-8 via USB ?
As a developer myself I know that these things are there for a reason and I'm grateful for everything there is. Mostly I know how to get around these things. However, these things are unfortunately some arguments that I've often heard against Free Software.
I think it would be good to have reasonable replies to hold against it.
Pb