I'm a sysadmin, so it's my job to know what's good for my users.

Yes, but do you also take input from your users on applications, or do you just pick and throw them to the wolves so to speak?

An admin that doesn't listen to his users will be out of his job pretty soon, I guess.

One thing I've seen was the admins, where I went to college, passed around a questionnaire regarding new applications we'd like to see used in the network and systems. It assembled a list of packages and other supportive dependencies that would be used with it. The setup was targeting Windows of course but it gave some insight into things. We did end up though with a lot of open source software however as opposed to software that was more proprietary.

I once worked as a system administrator (Unix systems) where the company standard text editor was emacs -- it had been installed on a couple of Perkin-Elmer superminis which featured, essentially, IBM DOS as an operating system and emacs gave folks the ability to have a full screen text editor. The company had added a group of Unix servers so, of course, they also added emacs to those and built a suite of macros for text editing (they did software development and documentation). emacs did not come with Unix servers, you had to get the source and build it from scratch. We're talking "dumb" terminals here: serial, ASCII, integrated keyboard, heat the room with the thing. We're talking early 80's here.

My job was to upgrade everything (except the Perkin-Elmers which were to be sold, people actually wanted them) to all-Unix while keeping the existing editing functions and adding a current version of emacs. You know, port a large FORTRAN base from Perkin-Elmer and the existing Unix servers to the new servers. And do it quick like a bunny. Got a couple Motorola servers (which replaced both P-Es and five Unix boxes). Had to support, oh, 25 users, don't remember exactly.

They did all documentation with nroff and modified documentation macros. The full suite of nroff, tbl, eqn and stuff but really, really old versions. I bought Documenters Workbench from AT&T Software Toolchest, installed that on the Motos, added the customized macros and moved from nroff to troff with a couple of PostScript printers (to improve the look of documentation from typewriter, (nroff) to, essentially, typesetting (troff). Everybody was happy except everybody wanted me to be the emacs consultant (which I am most definitely not) along with keeping the systems going. I'm the sysadmin, I use vi and I sure as hell wouldn't use emacs on a bet for system software. This is also the time when emacs started to speak lisp (what the hell is lisp and why in the world would I want to speak that?). Keep in mind that this is before the days of WYSIWYG word processors, you embedded formatting macros in your text document.

That all worked out, in the end. There were a couple of emacs gurus that were just fascinated with lisp and the "power editing" you could do with it and I was perfectly happy to let 'em have at it.

My philosophy is that Unix and Linux come with a large number of tools. Users, within reason, should have access to a given tool that does the job that needs doing. Text editors are one of those tools and the choice is, as far as I'm concerned, up to the individual user. You like this one? OK, there you go. You like this other one? Sure, go for it. Everybody was happy with Documenters Workbench (really, it's a good package that I still use particularly to write manual pages), nobody wanted to use TeX (and I don't blame 'em for that; I didn't either). We did look, we did evaluate, we did decide to just be quiet about it and we had one guy that dove in to TeX and did some pretty nice work with it -- just nobody else wanted to.

The moral of this story is that when an organization forces everyone into the same mold creativity and efficiency can go by the wayside (and can piss off some folks; you don't want pissed off folks). You've got a toolchest, choose which tool is best for what job and you're much better off in the end.

Hope this helps some.

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@tronayne: I guess my approach is 100 % pragmatic and the fruit of more than ten years of providing functional Linux desktops to family and friends. Something in the line of "hey I bought a new printer/scanner, can you configure that thing for me?" or "can I have that spinning desktop thing too?" or "I want to make a playlist and burn that to an audio CD". There was much (!) trial and error involved, so today - in my not so humble opinion - I have a pretty good idea of what works and what will make users cringe (and phone me on a sunday morning). My current MLED desktop setup is the fruit of all this experience.

lol - i know what you mean, but the statement in the way it is worded just makes my hair go up. In software development and database design, redundancy is the anti-christ. Admittedly, when talking about backups, it is the saviour.

sic!

The Linux ecosystem shall fulfill the needs of following categories of users, and only those categories:

1. Those who prefer one application per task.
2. Those who prefer several applications per task.
3. Those who do not fit in one of the previously mentioned categories, either because they have no preference, do not want to divulge their preference, or for any other reason.

Lets take openoffice as an example. I use the Writer, but instead of Calc, I usually use Gnumeric, I just prefer it.

For image editing, I usually use GIMP, but for command-line I use imagemagick to automate things.

I usually use geany for text/IDE, but I can't use it without Xorg, so if I don't have Xorg I use nano.

I always have rxvt as a backup terminal, although I prefer Lilyterm, some things don't work on Lilyterm, they mess up the display. I guess I could just use rxvt, but it has less functionality.

I suppose I could just get rid of all the redundancy, but it would be difficult and would reduce functionality.

Hey, Niki,

I'm actually on that same page -- I have the same ideas about what works and what doesn't and recommend those ideas when I get a convert. Like: buy H-P printers and scanners because H-P provides the best support for Linux; use OpenOffice for all your office needs (or maybe LibreOffice but not both). Things like that. Folks come to me because I know (pretty much, I can fake it really good) what I'm doing and why I'm doing it and I don't get any telephone calls at three in the morning.

BTW, your MLED looks pretty darned good, too.

Thanks for the flowers.