I’ve always thought of myself as being very loyal. Last week, at a team building event, many people described me as being extremely loyal. I’ve been wondering if this is really such a good thing. Many people have product loyalty, they buy their brandname shoes, their favourite cell phones, etc. without considering other options much.
I’ve been seeing the same trends with software. People tend to stick with what they know, and if they come across anything they don’t quite understand, they immediately dismiss it as being inferior or somehow, “not for them”.
You see this a lot with Windows users. They are so used to seeing Windows logos everywhere. They don’t care how well their system works, as long as they see those logo’s, they feel comfortable. Simply, because they know it.
It’s the same between many Linux distributions. People get into a distribution, how it works, and why it works well for them. Then, they absolutely convince themselves that no other distro can do as well in any situation.
In my opinion, distro loyalty is pointless. Having many, diverse distro’s is a good thing. I like that I can install Slackware on a machine as a file server, and its base system will be less than 100MB (as apposed to >300MB on many other systems). I like the way Debian handles packages, and the vast ammount of software that’s available for it, and I like the way that SuSE uses YaST to make administration tasks easier for the average small office user.
My personal feeling about loyalty, when it comes to software, is that I don’t have any. My policy is to always use the best software for the job. Which means that, if I use a certain piece of software, that it really is the best software I can find. I’ll even use Windows if it works better than Linux. At this stage though, that doesn’t seem likely to happen any time soon. I am quite excited about the recent GNU/HURD developments, though 
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