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KDE1 + antialiased and hinted fonts would genuinely be good. Personally, for awhile I used e16 as a desktop it mostly was quite nice, lightweight on resources (several megabytes of ram and negligible CPU) and *unintrusive*. I don't think the same can be said for any modern desktop at all.

Well, you're in luck: KDE1 was ported to modern distros as part of the KDE 20 year anniversary. (or here if you want info on building it yourself.)

There's nothing wrong with proprietary software as long as it is declared a such and we understand free software is better.

Although I've been running Kubuntu for over 10 years now and Linux (RH) since the late nineties I've never had a reason to visit this Ubuntu store, Muon (acces to the repositories) has most I want.

Quote from TFA:

After clicking on "More info" for some of the ones I don't know, I see "License: Unknown" and "Updates: Unknown". Basically, I am given the option to install software for which I have no idea what the license is.

Now that is wrong by any Linux and FS standard.

Another quote from TFA:

When clicking on "Books and magazines", there is a long list that is confused by the fact that 1) Some of the titles are not in English

Duuuhhhh, only a minority of people speak English, yes it is since the end of WWII the De Facto Lingua Franca of this world but why the hell would we translate everything in English?

Yes there are reasons to promote Free Software and this shop is clearly not doing it's part as seen from the Free Software movement.
But hey, it's run by a commercial entity, what else do you expect?
B.t.w, I'm more upset about the way Ubuntu (Shuttleworth) has recently been treating Jonathan Ridell and by proxy Kubuntu and KDE.
http://jriddell.org/2015/05/26...

"x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full kernel, full of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which barely has correct page protection. Then running your operating system on the other side of this brand new pile of shit. You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes." Long response:

I present to you, the rule of profanity: The use of profanity in any kind of prepared statement is proof positive of the weakness of the underlying argument.

It may or may not be true. But it's perceived as true by many, if not most, so it might as well be true. And in this case, poor Theo shot himself in the foot.

Profanity is used to add weight to a statement, but it's a very crude, rough kind of weight. As in "Oh shit, I've just been shot!" can be said by anybody, because being shot is, well, rough. But "shit" when talking about X86 code is just... quaint. And low brow. And self defeating.

Is the X86 instruction set weak? Yeah. Sure is. I won't argue that point. But the X86 instruction set has a strength that cannot be denied - it's compatible with a vast percentage of the software out there in the binary landscape. Everything from the flash player to freeDOS, all works with X86 first. It's an "upward spiral" where the mere inertia of the platform causes more people to jump on the bandwagon, which further increases the inertia, etc.

It's how ideological wars are won, and truth be told, X86 is an ideology as much as an engineering practice. X86 will continue to rule the day until the basic rules of computing change. This "sea change" will make X86 computing irrelevant, and there are already several things that might do this: Virtualization might be this. The Internet itself is a powerful driving force, since, with commodity exchange formats, the X86 platform offers reduced value. And finally, there's quantum computing out there, on the horizon.

But X86 has been actively developed for just shy of 30 years and the incredible investment in making it work, despite its warts, is high enough and profitable enough to nearly eliminate alternate platforms. AMD proved this with their Opteron processor, to replace X86 you first have to emulate it. Perfectly.

And I, myself, am an example of the strength of the X86 - I won't even consider anything but X86 for my servers - what I have works, and the perceived risk in going with anything else is greater than the relatively low, commodity cost of a new server. I can spend $2,500 on a nice, whitebox 1U Rackmount server and get all the bells and whistles, hundreds of GB of RAID 1 10K SCSI drives, 8 GB of ECC RAM, and 4 cores, each running at close to 3 Ghz.

That's an awful lot of power for the buck. Combined with reasonably well-designed software, and you have a mighty effective information processing tool that can single-handledly make hundreds, maybe thousands of users happy.

Short response:

Suck it, Theo!