the tales are many and terrifying that have to do with dueling gnomes. a good friend of mine one day said to me, "my sister's grandchildren will be telling their children of the tragic day that their great uncle michael installed ximian gnome on debian potato." some of the worst, though, have to do with duels between the red hat network's update service and red carpet. there are recorded cases where they're installing and uninstalling their own and each other's stuff *at the same time*! and this is going to get worse and worse and worse as distributions and NDEs (non-distribution entities) all increase the apparent sophistication of their update services, which increasingly tie the user not just to binaries but to binaries from the distributor only. which will fubar linux in general in many ways, not the lest being the functional equivalent of forking ala the unices. they're cutting the baby into pieces, never stopping to think that when they do that all they can possibly end up with is a piece of a dead baby.
Funeral march is playing when I write this, kind of fitting lol. I believe much more strongly in the Open Source nature of Linux, and that it will prevent what happened to Unix, however it maybe close. Guess it may get so bad as to kill Gnome...Then others will turn to KDE, nad lets hope the same does not happen there. Matt