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Desktop Linux is like Marxism utopia. Most likely my comment will be downvoted by some zealot with unstable psyche, so I decided to not reveal myself. Like it or not, head burial similar to ostriches won't change the reality. Desktop Linux was, is and will always be a niche with 1.5-2% market share

Summary of desktop Linux problems

• No stability, bugs, regressions
• Hardware issues
• Lack of standardization, fragmentation
• Lack of cooperation between open source developers, and internal wars
• A lot of rapid changes
• Unstable APIs/ABIs & lack of real compatibility
• Software issues
• Lack of money, enthusiasm, motivation and responsibility
• Lack of polish

Now I'm waiting with popcorn to random neckbeards proving that water is not wet.

Desktop Linux is like Marxism utopia. Most likely my comment will be downvoted by some zealot with unstable psyche, so I decided to not reveal myself. Like it or not, head burial similar to ostriches won't change the reality. Desktop Linux was, is and will always be a niche with 1.5-2% market share

Summary of desktop Linux problems

• No stability, bugs, regressions
• Hardware issues
• Lack of standardization, fragmentation
• Lack of cooperation between open source developers, and internal wars
• A lot of rapid changes
• Unstable APIs/ABIs & lack of real compatibility
• Software issues
• Lack of money, enthusiasm, motivation and responsibility
• Lack of polish

Now I'm waiting with popcorn to random neckbeards proving that water is not wet.

http://itvision.altervista.org...

The last pinnacle of desktop Linux was Ubuntu 10.04. That's it, every distro released after it is a mess. Canonical was the last company that invested so much resources for desktop Linux, now they run out of money and their enthusiasm is waning. There is no money with FOSS on the desktop, so they're investing more money for servers and enterprise but unfortunately they're not big players there either. Yet it's still the most desktop Linux devoted company but not doing right (for example the switch to Unity and now Gnome 3, the insane 6 month release cycle). And do you seriously expect a small team (Mint) to fix all the shit coming from upstream and Canonical? Desktop GNU/Linux is a mess, everyone is pulling it in his own direction, there is no visionary who would control all the development process. It has no future as long as we don't consider Chrome OS as a Linux distro.

Yes, it's also true. Fragmentation is just one of the problems.

The year of Linux on the desktop will never arrive simply because the age of the desktop computer is coming to a close. Most people don't want computers and can now do everything they ever needed them for on their phones and tablets.

Not quite. Smartphones/tablets are only good for content consumption, they can't fully replace PCs/Laptops at least if they lack laptop capabilities (for example tablet keyboard, mouse). PC/Laptop sales are falling because fewer people upgrade their computers. GNU/Linux on the desktop will unlikely arrive because it's not good enough for average people and has serious issues with quality, usability and backward compatibility. For people who just want to browse, watch videos or do simple document editing there is Chrome OS.

Unfortunately neither is Linux ready for desktop or even worse.

The Linux kernel surely takes over the world however Linux is nowhere to be seen on the desktop where it matters most.

There's there's this still little known fact that Google wants to replace the Linux kernel with their own one. So, Android is not particularly bound to Linux since the kernel part of Android is anyone's to take.

What about supercomputers? They are great, right, except they are basically huge calculators, so it's not like a huge win in my book. Besides, *BSD could have been used there as well.

Then there's this fact that application/web servers only use Linux'es CPU/storage/networking capabilities and almost nothing else and then you'll get a pretty bleak picture of Linux dominance.

And then you have this (a little bit outdated but still mostly relevant).

I see we have a Pawneean with us today.

Ben: Who still uses Alta Vista?

As a long time Android user I have to say this: there are two areas where Android totally completely utterly sucks: battery management and process management.

Battery management: it's nigh impossible to understand what exactly is draining your memory, how often your device wakes up and what sensors are in use unless you install quite specific apps and grant them quite specific permissions via adb, which is near impossible for 99% of users out there. And even when you do all of that, in most cases you're still left without any solutions because you don't know how to force Android not to use the said sensors or not to wake your device as often as it does. Also, most sensors in Android are 100% nondescript: you're looking at some weird combinations of symbols and digits and in most cases you cannot even Google for them. It's not like Android says: rotation-vector sensor is being used 100% of the time or anything like that.

Process management: in the past you could at least install certain apps which could show overall CPU usage and the CPU usage of each active app. Nowadays, there are no such options even when you enable development mode. Google did that for the sake of security but in the process they made Android even less opaque than it was before. Then you have another issue: which apps are indeed running in memory? which apps are swapped out? which are cached? It's all a fucking mess and unless you've rooted your device your only option is "Memory" [Information] which is simply a fucking abomination as it doesn't even show current info: it only shows aggregated stats for the past 3/6/12/24 hours.

For the past three development cycles (Android 7/8/9) I've created bug reports, i.e. feature requests, in Android bug tracker but each time they were either rejected or abandoned.

Google is hell-bent on making Android's internals opaque for the user and nothing so far has been able to persuade them otherwise.

The end result is that Android users are royally fucked but Google doesn't seem to care one bit.

And then you have this (a little bit outdated but still mostly relevant).

Yeah, except that Linux is not ready for the desktop.

It says that there's no Linux to speak of. When you're talking about any other mainstream OS (Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android) - they all have: 1) Universal packaging mechanism 2) A set of stable APIs/ABIs you can rely on 3) Some sort of UI stability.

All these these features are basically a swear word in the world of Linux distros.

It's a great excuse actually. When you create a Windows game, you create it for at most three platforms (Windows 7, 8 and 10.1 which largely have the same behavior, same APIs, same ABIs, same libraries; sans Direct3D 12 which is exclusive to Windows 10).

When you create a game for Linux you have to target a billion of platforms. Let game devs target Windows and test if the game properly runs under Wine/Proton - that would be enough.

This means exactly nothing for the desktop where it's most craved for.

FOSS works where it can be monetized by services, hardware lockdown, or donations. Some people call it as "The Blessed Trinity". And if the software doesn't fall in the blessed trinity category then sorry, a complex FOSS software will likely fail and won't be usable except for its developers. Unpaid/volunteer (F)OSS developers are generally itch scratchers and do only the parts of programming which are fun and exciting or they need need it personally. But this is 10-20% of the actual effort and 80-90% of the actual result. And the last 10-20% of polishing require 80-90% of the effort which are boring and unpleasant jobs such as documentation, bug fixing, QA, regression testing, following user interface design guidelines, etc... I could list them for hours. Such jobs often require financial motivation and deep knowledge/talent in particular areas. This problem is known as "The Last Mile Problem" which is well illustrated in JZW's CADT model and Artem Tashkinov's Major Linux Problems on the Desktop.

It would seem simple enough to rig up a LFSR to a few dozen .1 to 5W devices and have it cycle at some variable rate likely controlled by another LFSR. That should produce enough load noise, bonus points if you can have the low load devices do something useful. Generating good enough randomness is pretty easy, even really good randomness is pretty easy if you just have a bunch of reverse biased diodes and use the output to also control some devices to induce a random load.

Just use Coolsoft Midimapper: https://coolsoft.altervista.or...

One _single_ act doesn't magically negate the 20 years of why Microshaft sucks.

Have they disabled telemetry in Windows 10 yet? Why was ON in the _first_ place??

Can I buy an license for Windows 7? Forced upgrades are bullshit.

Can Explorer show me folder sizes yet? This isn't fucking rocket science, just basic computer science.

There are numerous technical reasons why Windows is still crap.

Microshit's "innovation" is total joke.

China's practices for using data are being used in large tech companies already and by our governments as well. These tools are basically the "all seeing eye" from Tolken and of course Orwell (other writers I'm sure). But this was also predicted by many movies and few noticed. Check out The Matrix, The Dark Night, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Spider-Man: Homecoming. The Circle talked about this more directly but less realistically. (The western government would never allow this monitoring on themselves anymore than the Russian or Chinese governments do). And China is not only tracking everyone through facial recognition glasses worn by police, not only are they keeping database with behavior scores to evaluate who is "disloyal" based on patterns (and past actions of course), but next month they are implementing a "Social Points" system to restrict access to travel for anyone who is considered disloyal based on that database and facial recognition. You are already required to show your ID card for virtually ANY transaction there now. (And is integrated in the WeChat Pay apps of course which is used widely).

If you are interested in stopping this abuse of data power, stop handing your data to them. Remove apps that are not open source (you can get open source apps for Android from F-Droid http://www.f-droid.org/ ). Install a firewall on your phone that can help manage what apps access (Droid Firewall is pretty good). Don't use default Google Android OS (you can't stop it from sending GPS data to them even if you turn it off...Google admitted this late last year, promising to stop using this hard wired phone home feature..sure..). LinageOS works on most Android phones. https://download.lineageos.org...)

Stop using MS Windows, especially Windows 8-10 because not only are data transmitters for every file header and website you visit, but every update Microsoft seems to take more control of the OS away from you (an idea probably borrowed from the iOS updates which did this years ago). You can't stop the auto updates unless you take extreme measures and even they don't work all the time and recently Microsoft is going to force your email links to be opened using Edge rather than your default browser selection. had enough being rammed with a broomstick handle yet by MS? Perhaps you noticed al this Xbox nonsense preinsstalled as well. Have fun reading this summary (see the data separately on other tech sites but this is a nice summary): https://itvision.altervista.or... . You can still buy Windows 7 legal licenses including from http://nerdsforless.com./ But better to just get off MS Windows. Linux can do virtually all the non-gaming things that MS Windows does (and MacOS as well). Linux Mint ( http://www.linuxmint.com/ ) is the easiest version of Linux for MS windows only users to get into. I've had kids as young as 7 years old run this with no assistance, and they all liked it MORE than MS Windows. "No crashes" I kept hearing. Using LibreOffice you can do all your office needs, (I've been on it for for 5 years and it keeps getting better), your favorite browsers (minus Edge but who uses that voluntarily these days) are all there, your email is easy peasy and will play all your videos and stuff. With no tracking from MS or the evil Cortana (that thing is horrible)

Keep any social media apps off your phone. Just...don't install them. You don't need them. Truth is anything that shares data over the web can be made as a mobile friendly website. The only reasons for an app is to take advantage of the data tracking tools on your phone and possibly install a local database there, generally for sending to a 3rd party later. That includes, GPS (in the vast majority of cases) and possibly accessing your contacts, browsing history, and let's not forget possibly your

Linux won in the mobile space. Linux runs on over 2 Billion monthly active devices.

Just because the the Linux kernel is used in Android doesn't mean that it's the Linux kernel's merit. It's like to say that 2 Billion cars using a particular engine means that the engine is successful while the original car, the engine is taken from, is lousy. Android is very much different from GNU/Linux, the Linux kernel is buried so deep that most of the developers don't know about it, and it can be replaced with something like this.

It would take much to look at the Ubuntu forums and see which threads generate the most replies, chances are, it's a problem that Canonical needs to solve, or hell, look through the *countless* threads on why *nix sucks, and see about fixing some of those.
Like, for example....here!
https://itvision.altervista.or...
no "opt out" needed

Debian is a pessimized distribution. It's compiled for the worst possible case. It has a filesystem layout guaranteed to cause conflicts between packages and they've not bothered to resolve those except where it's "noticeable". The default disk layout is sub-optimal. It puts ideology over getting anything done.

I'm not impressed by the others, either.

Frankly, I'm horrified by the state of Linux distributions. That people voted Debian up is not a surprise, however, because nobody expects the best from their computers any more. I used to run three MUDs on a 16 MHz 386SX, in addition to a mail server, DNS server, modem pool and an instance of X. I could compile GateD or Perl in the background without interfering with anyone's work. Did it do less? Well, it had just as many fonts in LaTeX, so I could still do all the DTP that Libre Office can do. Admittedly, I couldn't WYSIWYG it but nobody does that with LaTeX anyway and anyone who does it for regular documents is paying far too much attention to presentation and not enough to content.

(I forget where I saw the article on PowerPoint, but it argued that this emphasis on presentation was endangering R&D, promoting really bad ideas over much better ones, and was responsible for endangering the modern economy and several western democracies. Ok, maybe they overstated the threat to the economy, since you have to have one to endanger.)

Modern Linux is not as fast because of poor design choices by distros. We have no Linux Desktop because of even worse design choices by distros.

https://itvision.altervista.or...

These problems are THEIR fault (and the fault of OSDL's closed-door meetings with vendors). Yes, in almost every respect, Windows is worse. But Windows has mindshare and enough money to afford to be worse. Microsoft should have been broken up in 1998 when it was ordered to do so by the courts, but the appeals court reversed that - probably under government pressure - and we have to live with the fact that we're competing against Sauron.

And, yes, GET OFF MY LAWN!

Vista was a mess, but nowhere near as mess as desktop Linux.

JPEG uses RLE for entropy coding. Some compression tools, e.g. StuffIt and paq8px, improve on the use of RLE with specialized Huffman coding and by doing some re-arranging of the data. That allows them to losslessly compress JPEG files by 30% or more.

Of course, JPEG files do use Huffman coding, but it's much simpler and no used for entropy coding.

Take a look at the source code for some of the best performances on this list for details of how this is done: http://qlic.altervista.org/LPC...

No, the vast majority of software is proprietary. Proprietary software isn't going anywhere soon, so are copyrights and software patents. Developing a good product isn't cheap or fun and if there is no way to monetize it, then sorry, it's a suicide. One of the best examples of such failures is desktop Linux. Open source software has always existed even before any Richard Stallmans and nothing has radically changed.

That's not a link:

https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html

Now THAT'S a link!

Now pay attention kiddies, for this is why Linux is not on desktop yet. If you want someone to pay attention to you: Make it easier for THEM rather than yourself!

Yet another copy of the famous list of major Linux problems - too bad with many crucial omissions.

It's upsetting that the list of major Linux problems has existed pretty much unchanged for almost ten years now and very little of it changes year in and out.

Once we get a stable long term supported Linux software platform along with an equally stable supported kernel, and not dozens of incompatible distros whose versions are not compatible even with themselves, then maybe Linux on the desktop might have a chance. Right now it's a toy, and companies need instruments to work with, not toys. And don't remind me of LSB - it never really took off. The closest to LSB is RHEL but it's not a standard.

There are so many misconceptions and outright lies being spread here it's just staggering.

Firstly, Android contains the Linux kernel and nothing else from GNU. Android cannot be considered a Linux distro in any form.

Secondly, Android is not a desktop OS and it's not meant for productivity.

Thirdly, this "Ask Slashdot" most likely asks about Linux distros (i.e. Linux/GNU) and sorry, until

1) These problems are somehow fixed or overcome
and
2) We have a core Linux base (meaning common libraries with exact same APIs/ABIs supported for at least 5 years) which is shared between distros, so you can easily package software for any of them. // b.

I'm about to blow away an old Thinkpad I set up as a media center. Why? Poor video performance. Works great on Windows. On Linux... shearing, lag, etc. I spent a few days trying to fix it and it seems like everything is 100% correct and up-to-date. The video is just slow on Linux. So it's either throw it in the trash or find its old Windows disk.

Back in February, after one of my recent crashes, I replaced Linux on my primary workstation (Thinkpad again...), because NOTHING I was doing on Linux couldn't be done on Windows, and Linux power management was unstable, I was doing important work and got sick of my machine crashing when I swapped a few video cables. The 12 hours of updates I had to put into Windows was nothing compared to the time I was wasting troubleshooting my stability issues on Linux.

A few weeks ago I just removed a VM from service and put the services back on bare metal because KVM shat on my bridged networking when I ran a utility to change some network settings. KVM virtio FS passthru doesn't work in my distro anyway, so no point in troubleshooting, the IO performance on Linux was horrendous with NFS. I'll rebuild the host ESXi. The box is headless and Linux doesn't recognize the video, sound or anything, so no loss.

I've been using Linux for 22 years and honestly, it's a total waste of time to troubleshoot every distro's Rube Goldberg machine of a solution for the problem of the week. I have decided to stop trying. If it's broken, throw it in the trash, maybe it'll be better in 5 years, but I need to stick to my specialty and not waste my time on these issues.

I'll stick to Linux on servers in Devops fashion. When the distro goes hairy, wipe and rebuild. Linux on the desktop? I'm having fantastic luck with Virtualbox these past few years. I can move images from Linux to Windows to MacOS hosts no problem. KVM has some nice properties, but it's Linux-only so who cares? VMWare is your enterprise virtualization anyway. If your company can't afford VMWare, you're probably not being paid well anyway.

Given the trivial nature of virtualizing Linux, unless you're doing kernel development, why run Linux on bare metal? You can't even argue privacy, security or FOSS ideals if you're using those web apps for your office apps. If you're not using those, then what are you using for a calendar which syncs with your cellphone? Dont' say "owncloud..." ugh.

So whatever, Windows works great for me. It was crap 20 years ago, and on the server it's been lousy, but on the desktop? Linux never cut it for me.

..and I'm not alone https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html

Since this is likely to turn into a discussion of our favorite text editors, I have to say that I really like Notepadqq (http://notepadqq.altervista.org/wp/). It's inspired by Notepad++ and it feels very similar for those of us who do most of our work in Windows. Combine it with the Inconsolata font (http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html) and you can't go wrong.

"Systemd, the ever growing cancer that seeks to subsume the entire Linux userland..."

Who benefits from SystemD destructiveness? Red Hat's consulting? Microsoft?

Linux does seem to be moving in the direction of destroying itself. Stories:

9 Lethal Linux Commands You Should Never Run

The top 5 problems with Linux. Quote: "... the community is vastly divided by tribal identity."

Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2017 edition

When people claim that Linux is a good alternative to Windows, I simply start laughing.

Nope, in 2017 Linux sucks balls for most desktop uses and there's no end in sight. It might work for you if you disregard tons of problems, shortcomings, greatly increased power usage, very unstable nature even for LTS distros (read Ubuntu security mailing list - at least 20% of updates lead to major regressions) and give up on thousands of applications.

// Artem S. Tashkinov

So that you can use GNU software without straightjacketing yourself into a Linux desktop.

See the summary https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html#Summary

Web developers have been relying on MacOS for years to get a decent Unix environment. MS is looking to take that market before Apple comes to their senses and starts manufacturing hardware again.

We must have it or we're fucked. I've been telling this to Google for years, but they don't seem to be interested. As a result we have literally hundreds of millions of Android devices with dozens of remote vulnerabilities, the devices which aren't supported and cannot be upgraded to anything else. And it's getting worse day by day.

It's not about only Unity: Linux/GNU in general is one big mess of an OS.

If you ask people who actually use their PCs for work, most of them will tell you that the best DEs are reminiscent of Windows 95 with various small productivity improvements like Search in the Start Menu, icons only in task panel, vs. icon + application name, virtual desktops, widgets and good keyboard shortcuts. Also people generally cannot tolerate simplicity and scarcity in regard to customizability and features first introduced by Apple, now reduced to nothingness by Gnome 3/Unity/Windows 10. I know quite a lot of people who were relieved after migrating from Unity/Gnome to "old fashioned" XFCE.

For some reasons various UX wannabes try to reinvent the desktop every few years and they fail, fail and fail. The prime examples are well known: KDE4/5, Gnome 3, Unity and Windows 8/10 interfaces (yes, Windows 10 Start Menu is as horrible as Windows 8 apps start screen). It seems like modern designers are hell bent on turning your beautiful PC UIs first designed for display/mouse/keyboard, into some grayish mess of huge buttons, tons of white space and nondescript controls meant for tablets and phones. I cannot imagine a common UI which will work equally well on such distinct platforms. I suspect it just doesn't exist.

1. will allow to completely disable telemetry (or won't include it at all)
2. will not have any mention of UWP/Metro (right now it's even built into Explorer)
3. will allow to control updates and Windows Defender
4. will return Classic Control Panel along with all removed options like Glass, Classic UI, etc.
5. Will introduce Service packs back.

Until then Windows 7 is more than good for me.

What's the best way for a newbie to get started with Linux?

Here's how it works in Linux.

Either you're very lucky and Linux works for you out of the box and you don't have problems with your hardware or you're very unlucky and you have troubles with your hardware and software.

I'd recommend that you download Xubuntu/Mint LiveCDs, run them and verify that your PC works (including your GPU/peripherals like printers and scanners/networking like Wi-Fi/LAN). After that you may proceed with the actual installation. If you want to spare yourself from frequent OS upgrades, please install an LTS version of a chosen distro.

Linux even in 2017 is not exactly a friendly OS with zero problems, the truth is to the contrary. Unless you're content with the software your distro provides, you'll have to teach yourself command line and Linux CLI commands.

Also make sure you read this article - it has a lot of wisdom in regard to Linux and its inner workings for a beginner like you.

What's the best way for a newbie to get started with Linux?

Here's how it works in Linux.

Either you're very lucky and Linux works for you out of the box and you don't have problems with your hardware or you're very unlucky and you have troubles with your hardware and software.

I'd recommend that you download Xubuntu/Mint LiveCDs, run them and verify that your PC works (including your GPU/peripherals like printers and scanners/networking like Wi-Fi/LAN). After that you may proceed with the actual installation. If you want to spare yourself from frequent OS upgrades, please install an LTS version of a chosen distro.

Linux even in 2017 is not exactly a friendly OS with zero problems, the truth is to the contrary. Unless you're content with the software your distro provides, you'll have to teach yourself command line and Linux CLI commands.

Also make sure you read this article - it has a lot of wisdom in regard to Linux and its inner workings for a beginner like you.

Android has a lot more problems than you think and Google does nothing to solve it.

We need a standard ARM platform, just like we've had the x86 platform since roughly 1981. And Google has all the resources to create and enforce it. And since they don't I wonder if they are malicious or negligent or it's just part of their business plan which is called "planned obsolesce". Too bad, in Google's case this obsolesce involves even original Google devices like Nexus 5 (stopped receiving any updates since October 2016) and it will soon be joined by Nexus 6.

That's just horrible.

While I commend him for trying to bring down the price of decent Android phones to this range, I'd love to see the problem of Android updates to be solved. That's a pressing issue and it should be given the highest priority at Google.

It sucks when 90% of Apple devices already run iOS 10, while less than 1% of Android phones run Android 7.1.1. Maybe Android updates cannot be solved because ARM devices are basically different platforms but there must be a way to at least fix all the vulnerabilities which are a plenty. Google has the resources to force all vendors follow the same update protocol and have them release their firmware as open source so that Google could apply security fixes/patches and distribute OTA updates instead of uncaring OEMs and network operators.

That's for yet another Linux distro.

The Nexus 5 (2013), which packs in a Snapdragon 800 SoC coupled with 2GB of RAM and 5-inch full-HD display, won't be receiving Android Nougat update

iOS haters always say that you should only buy Google approved(tm) Android devices to stay up to day, and here it is, Google shitting on you. A perfect by today's standards device is no longer receiving updates because ... because nothing. An organization which earns billions of dollars every quarter cannot afford to maintain its older but perfectly capable devices.

Hopefully one day Android will become a true OS vs. what we have now: basically a heavily modified lego for each and every device. There's no Android OS which you can throw at a random ARM device and have it running with all the components functioning properly (camera, WiFi, 3G/4G, sensors, storage, etc.)

No, again, this is peer-reviewed, quantified, eyewitness evidence

...evidence for what, exactly?

The link you gave sent me to a study about near-death experiences (NDE)

First, the link you gave asks me to create an account to see the whole thing. No thanks to that so I searched for a different site.

http://profezie3m.altervista.o...

From my link, it tells me that of the 509 cases from 344 patients, only 62, or 18% of patients reports some level of recalling NDE. Not a very high number. You can't even be that one in five dentist who won't recommend sugar free gum!

Second, even if we take that 18% at face value, so what? So what if NDE exists? An NDE isn't evidence for religion or the supernatural. People once thought comets and solar eclipses were supernatural, and those were a lot easier to observe. Now we have a better understanding of them. That there may be something out there that we haven't fully observed or understood (yet) is not evidence that the supernatural exists. If you think that proves something about the supernatural or God, you're essentially presenting a God of the gaps argument there

you are presenting as "evidence" simply a reiteration of the same basic premise--that there are no supernatural events

No, it is you who are operating under the same basic premise that he has to somehow prove a negative to you. How about you prove to me that there is no invisible teacup hanging out on the dark side of the moon?

The onus is on you (well, the religious) to prove that the supernatural, gods, or whatever else your holy book says is true, is true.

To not understand something so basic and to try and hide it with the diatribe that is the rest of your post, it is you who lack intellectual honesty and scientific integrity, my friend.

which has very minimal, I can even say non-existing, QA/QC and no unit tests at all.

Not so greatest then, considering the number of regressions in each kernel release.

Not so greatest then, considering that people get tired of adjusting their code to new APIs which inevitably leads to even more regressions.

Not so greatest then, considering that bug reports in bugzilla.kernel.org often receive zero attention and LKML posts are lost in the noise of hundreds of patches published every day.

You know, Greg, you don't sound convincing. You sound like a marketer of some dietary supplement.

I know this comment will be modded to hell by rabid Linux fanboys, but I'm just tired of this BS remarks made by open source advocates. The truth of course is a lot less exciting.

You mean you're not using Photoshop for UNIX?

The Wang patent was actually for having nine chips on a SIMM. When Wang started enforcing its patent, competitors switched to putting three chips on a SIMM instead. During that transition, parity RAM was scarce and expensive -- 9-chip because it was being phased out and 3-chip because quantities weren't available at first. It got people to reconsider whether parity was necessary, and it became "socially acceptable" to have non-parity RAM.

Back in the days of discrete RAM chips, they were always installed in multiples of 18.

Acrylic DNS works well for me

http://mayakron.altervista.org...

Our work DNS is sometimes very laggy. Using Acrylic even with the default configuration fixes that instantly.

If religious people had any proof, it would no longer be religion.

Sure it would. Why would the definition of "religion" change? I mean, the real one, not the Dawkins made-up one.

But, "proof" (clever of you to goalpost-shift this up front to a criteria virtually nothing, including science, can meet, by the way) would be tantamount to worldwide forced conversion. You'd either have to accept it, or go to an asylum for denying basic proven facts. Might you see a reason a God would not want that, particularly in this era of global communication?

That said, to use reasonable epistemological criteria, here's peer-reviewed evidence. As with most domains, -evidence-, not -proof-, is the intellectually-honest expectation.

Say...repeating multiple times the peer-reviewed study (and it's contained test cases) here:

http://www.thelancet.com/journ....
http://profezie3m.altervista.o...

--and persistently finding a lack of reported empirical verification of the predictive accuracy of the mainline hypothesis of the "designer", rather than consistently finding empirical (i.e. "eyewitness sense data derived") verification of its predictions. The latter being the actual case we see per reality.

There's one. Additional and/or better ones in no way excluded by providing this one.