It has happened to all of us: you go looking for a software package to solve a problem and you find a great open source project. And then another. And another. Why does this happen?
There’s More than One Way to Pet a Cat
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Sometimes multiple projects exist to solve the same problem because there are multiple approaches. The approaches can vary on technical merits or stylistic choices. Why have both a socket wrench and a box-end wrench in your toolbox? They’re both tools for turning bolts, but they have different features.
For example, KDE Plasma and LXQt are both Qt-based desktop environments. But Plasma is designed for a more feature-rich experience while LXQt is lightweight. When version 3 of the GNOME desktop came out, some people preferred the version 2 style and so continued developing it as the MATE desktop.