# Holy War

Holy war is a long passionate argument over a choice (many times between two options) that touches an issue deemed controversial and/or "religious" within given community; to an outsider this may seem like a childish, hard to understand rant about an insignificant matter. In technology circles holy wars revolve e.g. around operating systems, text editors, programming languages, licenses, source code formatting etc. Such a war separates people into almost religious groups that sometimes argue to death about details such as what name something should be given, very much resembling traditional disputes between religions and their churches -- you would think people being on the same ship (for instance promoters of free software) would at least get along better with each other than with outsiders but no, the strife grows larger among neighbors sharing land and they will fight to death over minuscule details and though they often have valid reasons for it, it's hard for the outsider to spot or appreciate the reason without deeper insight (a choice regarding minor detail may tell a lot about that who makes it). In holy wars people tend to defend whichever side they stand on beyond grave and can get emotional during the discourse, leading to flame wars, ragequits, Hitler arguments etc. Some examples of holy wars are (in brackets indicated the side taken by LRS):

- **tabs vs spaces** (spaces)
- **vim vs emacs vs acme and other text editors** (vim)
- **free software vs open source vs proprietary vs whatever else** (free software)
- **Chrome vs Firefox**, and other browsers (none of this bloated shit)
- **Java vs C++, Lisp vs Forth and other programming languages** (C, comun)
- **curly brackets on separate lines or not**, and other style choices
- **KDE vs GNOME** (neither, both are bloat)
- **pronunciation of gif as "gif" vs "jif"**
- **Windows vs Mac** (neither, this is a normie holy war)
- **"GNU/Linux" vs "Linux"** (GNU/linux)
- **copyleft vs permissive** (permissive, public domain)
- **AMD vs Intel**
- **AMD vs NVidia**
- **"Linux" distros**
- **window managers**
- **Metric vs Imperial units** (metric)
- **Star Trek vs Star Wars**, and other franchise wars
- **Quake vs Unreal Tournament**, and similar gaming shit
- **gopher vs gemini** (gopher)
- ...

Things like cats vs dogs or sci-fi vs fantasy may or may not be a holy war, there is a bit of a doubt in the fact that one can easily like both and/or not be such a diehard fan of one or the other. A subject of holy war probably has to be something divisive. Maybe a controversy of its own could be the very topic of "what is a holy war" in itself.

## See Also

- Church of Emacs
- competition
- settled