Or, "…Why your choice sucks and you deserve to be eliminated". Nothing is sacred, from your choice of video player to your preferred keyboard layout.
"
If ever there was a holy war, it was that which saved our liberties and gave us independence.
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—of course it was Thomas Jefferson
There's Vi vs. EMacs and historically ed vs.vi, every programming language vs. every other language (not to forget tabs vs. spaces =]. There's systemd vs. the rest of the world, GNOME vs. KDE, BSD vs. Linux, one open source licence vs. the rest and of course, Dvorak vs. QWERTY. alacritty v.s kitty is a thing (yes, even your terminal emulator choice will be mocked, and you with it, ya moron! Also, only a fool uses the provided GUI editor. (Damnit, even here KDE vs. GNOME vs. GNOME vs KDE, FFS. Some people will have their choices tattooed onto their bodies as well as in their hearts, and of course there's bound to be at least one stcker on their laptop advertising their chosen side.
At the start of my journey into tech geekdom I was mildly surprised at the wild way in which many people adhere to and defend their preferences (see also flame wars). From the choice of operating system to preferred text editor, word processor, to music player, nothing is sacrosanct, no cow too sacred; users will die on the hill of emacs vs. vim, Windows vs. anything else, Linux distribution or flavour, desktop environment even your terminal emulator and shell. (For the record, xfce4-terminal and Bash are correct and clearly superior!)
From the cultish passion of the Apple fanboi, the grim faces of the WIndoze troops, the fanatical Linux geeks armed to the teeth, it goes way beyond this. Friendly fire is also organised, competing battalions of Vi ("prounced vee-eye! as any fule kno) and Emacs users, and the commando troops that support The One True Editor, ed.
As an example, a friend of mine recently attempted to switch to desktop Linux from Microsoft Windows. At some point he gave up, dismayed by the sniping at some of the decisions he'd made that some others told him "were wrong". Wong distro, wrong choice of desktop environment or the wrong platform. He described the community as "toxic" and certainly on the face of it, it seems that way. If you doubt me, go to almost any Linux forum and defend systemd. Here's a big issue with Linux, which I touched on in here. The issue is that despite the number of choices available, someone will attempt to create a solution for all use cases, and of course there's a relevant xkcd to be found here on that very topic.
Linux (and before that, Unix) is especially prone to this kind of holy war, and they have been going on for a long time, to the point where it's become its own meme. It runs from memes poking fun at the others to outright rage at the suggestion that there's even an alternative.(The funnies include such as "The best random string generator must be to sit a new user in front of VIm and capture the keystrokes as they attempt to close the program.", or "how do I close vim, other than pkill vim?"). But it's a serious business, choosing a text editor; it will determine your future steps and who knows which road leads to Rivendell?. Anyone wrangling code or managing systems config files for a living spends a lot of time in the text editor, but will be scorned for their choice. No-one is immune, as we each have preferences in that arena, and everyone has perfectly valid reasons to support and defend their choices. For my part, I chose the Vim side, because it or vi is most likely to have been installed on pretty much any system (apart from the ridiculous or evil Ubuntu which at least in my experience sets up nano. And nobody uses nano by choice, right? In my defence, I have tried emacs and found it difficult and confusing. After all, once one has mastered the grammar of Vim, its ridiculously easy to navigate, edit and manage files. So much simpler than those painful EMacs keyboard chords that will surely lead to RSI and possibly even crippling arthritis and profound insanity. Of course the EMacs users reach for "the easy extensibility of EMacs, because Lisp" and "the power of Org mode". To this day I remain baffled. EMacs is powerful, I agree, but I feel, like many others, that "it's a decent operating system and language, lacking only a decent text editor", too complex and trying too hard to do too much.
I still find myself sniping at Ubuntu, "the Microsoft of the Linux world", pour scorn on its insistence on controlling the user via its Snaps. It took a perfectly good Debian and spoiled it thoroughly, and its spoiled users seem to dominate or be pandered to. Don't even get me started on the vile and ugly Gnome desktop environment or the over-complex mash of KDE. Everyone knows xfce's superiority, heck, the Windows interface is better than Gnome. As to tiling window managers, No Thank You Very Much. Even though I'm a well-known fan of keyboard-driven OSes, that is a step too far. No, I agree that I would probably eventually reach the Nirvana of a better workflow and make the best use of my laptop's screen real estate, but honestly the thought of configuring the layout, the interminable keyboard shortcuts and even (in the case of XMonad, learning the Haskell programming language just to set it up). But their defenders support this path; after all, they might say, "one does not simply walk into Mordor", but it's a road that would lead me to madness. And of course, every programming language has its own, special PVP arena.
As the vice-president of the local Linux Users' Group I've watched many people make their presentations using their software-of-choice and felt the collective shuddering of the gathered geeks watch someone else use things that were so alien as to be horrifying. The bloated and perplexing Gnome interface, that one user who attempted to use EMacs to do his entire presentation and thoroughly botched the attempt. Unlike my perfectly flawless and clean presentation on the future of our little group. Of course, no-one noticed the beautiful way I switched to Presentation mode using a script of my own devising, using just a single easily-configured keystroke combination. Oh, no, they'd rather pick holes in the fact that my distro had not yet chosen to upgrade me to the latest-and-greatest Linux kernel, which clearly made OpenSUSE an insecure pile of steaming shit. Yes, even the version number will be sniped at, revealing you to be a simpleton deserving of a slow and painful gut-shot death on the bloody battlefield.
Holy wars have been going on a long time. Yesterday, as I sat in a cafe, researching writing up WordPerfect, talking to one of my neighbour geeks, I was informed that WordPerfect was fundamentally flawed, its philosophy out of date and that "Word was destined to be the superior product". Manifest Destiny rears its ugly head in the coffee shop. The ensuing fight was harsh and bloody, severed limbs everywhere, blood-spattered laptops shattered by gunfire littering the floor. Shit gets real in the world of software freedom of choice.
Truth to tell, like every war there are the "Freedom vs. Terrorist" cliques. We have always been at war wih Eastasia. War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength and Freedom is Slavery. It is ridiculous, but you will still have to prise my desktop configuration and Vim, from my cold, dead fingers. Happy Fourth of July.
P.S.
I'm betting that someone is going to find a nodeshell or topic that needs to be covered to support this writeup. If you feel strongly that Something Must Be Done about a topic, feel free to ask me to cover it. Or, of course, write it yourself, ya lazy git. Also, be sure to click on the [chaos] link to see all the softlinks and experience the true extent of the war. It should go without saying that this is all sarcastic; if you have hurt feelings about what I wrote about your choices, go and touch some grass ♥ =].
$ xclip -o | wc -w
1053