I am read­ing com­ments about ars tech­ni­ca's KDE 3.2 re­view in /., os­news, etc.

Here's the stupid ar­gu­ment I men­tioned in the ti­tle: "G­NOME is bet­ter than KDE be­cause GNOME does X and KDE does Y" [1]

That ar­gu­ment is ab­so­lute­ly stupid un­less you can show in­con­tro­versible proof that X is bet­ter than Y. And for 99% of the in­stances of the ar­gu­men­t, you can't. And even in that case, you are iso­lat­ing one fea­ture or de­ci­sion in a very com­plex sys­tem.

Is "yes/No" but­ton or­der­ing bet­ter? Maybe. Maybe not. I know "No/Yes" di­alogs piss me of­f, but that does­n't mean one is ab­so­lute­ly bet­ter.

And be­sides, sup­pose KDE de­cid­ed to do all things like GNOME. Min­i­mal­is­tic UI, GCon­f-ed­i­tor for any­thing more ad­vanced than chang­ing the date.

Then what's the point? Why would an­oth­er bland, bor­ing UI be use­ful at al­l? [2]

There's a say­ing: "Taste is in va­ri­ety".

In an old­er ver­sion of this, I said foot­notes were bro­ken. They aren't, as you can see :-)