Looks like it's the end of the line for OpenVMS as well.
I would pay good, American money, to have OpenVMS open-sourced instead of just languishing like other DEC OS's. Why can't RSTS/E or RSX-11 be free? What could that possibly cost HP? Same with OpenVMS at this point. It's a great system, and I would love to see it available to average joes.
Someone who isn't as lazy as I am should start an "Open Source OpenVMS!" petition.
Someone really needs to explain the appeal of Kubuntu and KDE to me. I just don't get it. It's so *busy*: everything is huge with glowing drop shadows and spinning cursors and animations everywhere. It's also the only desktop environment I've ever sat down at that I couldn't just use immediately - I tried "creating an activity" and was left with a completely blank desktop, not even any panels or anything. There may have been keyboard shortcuts to get out of that situation, but I didn't know them and shouldn't have had to. I tried creating another activity later and the session segfaulted. This was a release version, not a beta or something.
I really want to like KDE, truly. I used KDE on FreeBSD for years, but eventually moved over to CDE on Solaris and then GNOME on Linux. I tried going back to KDE with Kubuntu 13.04 and had the above experience. So someone, please explain what KDE offers that I don't get through GNOME, Unity, XFCE, or Razor...
Most state laws (I'm assuming you're in the United States) allow for a DUI conviction if you are in "actual control" of a vehicle. That means if you're asleep drunk in the car and the keys are also in the car, you can be found guilty. If you're parked on private land and drunk, you can be found guilty. If you're in the driver's seat in an automated car and the car could be switched to manual control, you could be convicted of DUI if you're drunk.
That's what worries me. The transition to fully automatic cars needs to be essentially 100%, or at least 99% with a "pull over and stop moving" for the remaining 1%. Otherwise I would've be surprised if fatalities went *up* due to drivers taking a nap/getting drunk/reading a book and failing to notice when they need to take back over.
HDTV was the best thing to ever happen to laptop manufacturers. My CRT monitor in 1997 had a roughly equivalent resolution than my laptop today (1366/768). With the advent of HDTV, computer display manufacturers went out and rebranded everything as "True HD", implying to consumers that these are really high resolution displays because, well, HDTV is so much better than SDTV, a True HD monitor must be really great too! Hiding behind those letters made it easy to mislead customers about the actual resolution of their displays.
I would love to have a QHD laptop. Hell, I wish there were more than just a few 1080p laptops out there. The QHD laptops are finally starting to arrive, but they're slow coming. I wish I could get a Chromebook Pixel without the, you know, Chromebook part.
Now that Clang/LLVM has got this finished, I'm wondering what a system would look like with:
* Linux as the kernel
* Clang/LLVM as the system C/C++ compiler
* Heirloom Toolchest as the basic userland toolchain
* Wayland as the underlying display system
* musl as the system C library
That would be Linux, but would contain almost no GNU code. Not that I have anything against GNU, but the Heirloom Toolchest, Clang, and musl are all more standards compliant, smaller, and often faster than their GNU counterparts. I wonder what a Linux distribution like that would look like. I'd use it.
(I hate how "GNU's Not Unix!" is really becoming more and more true. Unix was about minimalism, and sometimes GNU seems like it's about stuffing everything possible into every tool.)
That right there says something. Ubuntu and Arch are at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of usability for new users.
Ubuntu is stuck between two communities: hardcore Linux users and everyone else. People complain about Ubuntu making user interface decisions, but you know what? Most people don't want an interface that's got a million different configuration options, they just want an interface that works. When they open up their settings, they want to see things like "Displays" not "LXRandR" which is inscruitable or "Gigolo" which is childish and uninformative.
Every "user friendly" distro I've ever looked at has been less user friendly than Ubuntu. The biggest problem I've noticed is a million different things in the configuration menu, each doing something slightly differently and with undescriptive names. A lot of users don't want to know what OpenBox is. Fedora is better in this regard by relying on GNOME heavily, but its installer isn't a polished as Ubuntu's and harder to use for new users, and its release and support cycle is too quick.
So that's the problem in a nutshell. Ubuntu is "too easy" (or, more charitably, "not configurable enough") for the hardcore Linux user and doesn't offer enough of an advantage over Windows or Mac OS X for the rest of the world. The average computer user just wants something that works, and doesn't know or care about "freedom" or "community". They see a computer for what it is - a tool to get their work done.
I personally use Linux because some flavor of Linux has been my primary operating system since I gave up my Amiga 20 years ago, and I use Ubuntu because it "just works" for the most part. I tried Fedora for a long time, but the rapid upgrades were distracting, yum isn't as good as apt for removing installed dependencies on uninstall, subjectively the available repos aren't as good, and I *hate* Evolution. I used Slackware and Arch for a long time (dwm, mailx, and Firefox were for a long time my default environment), but then I found that I was spending more time dealing with quirks or "customizing" my machine than I was doing actual work. One day, I was writing a script that I was running from.xsession that would periodically check my laptop's battery status and call xdialog to warn me if the battery got to low when I realized what I was doing - I was writing a script to do something that every modern desktop system would do for me, and better. Same for trying to get hotplugging USB keyboards to work with always swapping Ctrl and Caps Lock. While it reminded me of my early days of Slackware on an old Packard Bell in 1994, I'm just too old to care about that anymore. I have work to do.
No, dissent isn't silenced - feel free to perform the necessary research, compile a paper, and, if it is well-researched, it will appear in the pages of Popular Science.
Dissent just because you disagree with something isn't science, it's just opinion. A magazine that prides itself on bringing science to the masses doesn't want people who have a misunderstanding of what science even is skewing the results. Science isn't based on opinion. There are plenty of parenting websites that ban you if you suggest vaccines cause autism, for example. If you want to discuss things that aren't supported by evidence, feel free, but do it somewhere that isn't reporting science.
Yes, but if something groundbreaking comes about that shakes the foundations of evolutionary theory, it's going to be published in Popular Science, not posted in its comments section.
You know what I find interesting - when you think about the scale of Linux and how much innovation it has spurred, how diverse and vast its install base is, Linus is more of a "job creator" than Mitt Romney or Rand Paul, but for some reason they think they should pay less in taxes than he does, percentage-wise.
A very large number of cloud servers out there are running a bunch of Java applications inside a single application server inside a single JVM. The entire Linux kernel, virtual filesystem, daemons, user commands, etc, are just along for the ride. Having a barebones operating system that is just enough to run a JVM application server would fill a need for a lot of people. It's not a panacea and it's not the right choice for most virtual servers out there, but for some it makes a whole lot of sense.
I find it funny that some people just *hate it* when new things come out that do something in ways different from how they've done them in the past. In the thread on GNOME and Wayland below, some people just can't understand why we shouldn't continue to use X11 for the rest of eternity since it works now. Some people in this thread don't understand that even though Linux works well for virtual servers, sometimes for some applications, this might work better -- and that it's okay that that's how things are!
It's not that Wayland does a whole bunch that X doesn't, it's that X has a lot more hoops to jump through to keep going. Wayland just presents what amounts of a framebuffer and a simple protocol to let the compositor and clients communicate about size changes, movement, available displays, etc.
All of the modern graphical environments and applications are using the COMPOSITE extension to X, which adds an extra step to a lot of graphical operations. Plus, to be "X", you have to support things like the old X line-drawing primitives, fonts in the server, and other things that simply aren't used anymore. Important things like changing the screen resolution are kept in protocol extensions that you have to check for before using. Large amounts of code and protocol are dedicated to working with screens of vastly different capabilities - everything from monochrome monitors to "true color" displays. Nobody has a fixed-sized monochrome X terminal anymore, but the code has to account for it still.
Plus X stores a ton of things in the server, making it big, slow, and a source of potential security/information disclosure issues. Wayland stores less and does less.
In other words, developers are hamstrung having to maintain and work around lots and lots of very old code that will never, ever be used by a new application, ever, but has to be there, even though it slows things down, takes up space, and makes things more complicated.
Personally, I would've liked to have seen something more like "make COMPOSITE a part of the core X protocol and deprecate lots of things" and see X slowly evolve into a more "modern" system, but that's just me.
As for GNOME - I realize that GNOME 3 is different from GNOME 2, but I'm at least happy that for once the Open Source community *tried something different* instead of just aping Windows or Mac OS X (though GNOME 3 is obviously inspired by the latter). Maybe it worked, maybe it didn't, but at least we can claim to attempt to lead, instead of just blindly following.
The problem with Crouton is that anyone with a Google account has complete access to the chroot. All they have to do is login with their Google account, and then hope over to the chroot. The Crouton chroot is owned by the "Google Chrome User", of which there is only one, shared by all the Google Accounts on the box.
Even barring that, using Crouton still means sending data to Google, which I don't like.
I bought a Chromebook for my mother-in-law. For her, it's absolutely perfect: she can't break it too badly, there's essentially no risk of malware, updates are installed automatically, and it's got a keyboard. All she needs to do is read email, look at pictures of her grandson, and surf the web.
As for me, I want a Chromebook Pixel, but wiped and running a full distro of Linux...the hardware is gorgeous.
Not that peanut and gluten allergies don't exist, but in the past few years I've gone from knowing no one with either to running into people everywhere with one or the other. Seriously, I work with three people with gluten allergies, one guy with a peanut allergy, and the waitress who served me at a restaurant last night told me she'd never had the sandwiches there because she had a gluten allergy. Menus are popping up everywhere with gluten free options.
Schools are setting themselves up as peanut free areas and banning all peanut products even though the number of severe food reactions in a country of 310,000,000 is less than 2000 a year, with fewer than 150 deaths from all food allergies in all age groups combined. More than ten times as many people die falling down the stairs every year, but we're not mandating that schools be single-story. The rate of deaths by firearm for school-aged children is far far higher (second most likely cause of death for high-school aged children after car accidents), but we don't ban guns from homes with school-aged children or prevent school-aged from going to friends' houses where there are guns.
So, don't get me wrong - peanut allergies and gluten allergies most certainly exist, but the response in lots of places has been all out of proportion to the risk involved. I wonder if part of it has to do with the easy accessiblity of compatriots via social media. We as a species like to panic about things. I'm not immune: when my son was born preterm (he's fine now) my wife and I went into what could only be described as folie a deux about his health.
I've tried for years to like KDE, and I just can't. It's too *busy*. It's the first desktop I've ever sat down at that I couldn't just use right away - I clicked on a button, and up popped "Activities". Creating a new activity left me with a blank screen and nothing to do. Everything is animated and glowing, with huge distracting icons and drop-shadows.
GNOME is all right. GNOME 3 might be weird, but at least it's trying to do something other than emulate Windows or Mac OS X. It's just too buggy for my tastes.
XFCE is all right too, but I was turned off by how haphazard and...unprofessional Xubuntu was. I didn't like having to explain to my eight year old nephew's mother why he was asking what "Gigolo" did, for example.
Unity, despite its many faults, comes with Ubuntu. Despite *its* many faults, Ubuntu is the only open source OS I've used that actually seems like an integrated product. With Unity on Ubuntu, you don't get things like "Gigolo" which is just stupid or "lxrandr" which is inscruitable. You don't get a million different ways to customize things down to where you can make your desktop look like an angry fruit salad. That may or may not be a good thing.
Also, say what you will about Mir but Ubuntu is at least trying to make an integrated system. The other desktops are really poorly integrated with the rest of the system, resulting in my having to explain to my father "No, you're using Debian" "I thought I was using Linux" "You are, it's the Debian distribution" "Why is this called GNOME Terminal then?" "That's the desktop environment" "This says I'm using X windows" "That's the underlying display architecture..." Users of Windows don't know what GDI is unless they're looking for it. Same with Quartz and Mac OS X.
I hate to say it, but the non-baseline-Ubuntu distributions are not really doing a great job of making a desktop operating system. Like was said the recent thread on Fedora Core's newly-proposed model: they're just a bunch of products from different people thrown together into one mass. I appreciate the amount of effort the distributors go to, but Ubuntu has gone just a little bit farther and made something that feels like a modern, unified operating system. Some people don't like that, but a lot do.
So the only thing that keeps me from using Fedora is yum. I do a lot of "experimental" or "temporary" package installations. I want to try out a new editor or a new programming language or something, so I do an installation. All of the various package managers will automatically pull in the dependencies, which is great, but yum doesn't uninstall these dependencies when I uninstall the original package. So, say I install something that requires 9803942834 dependencies. When I uninstall it under Debian, all those dependencies leave with it - when I uninstall it on Fedora, I still have 9803942834 - 1 packages laying around. It's annoying. Get that fixed with yum, and I'll give Fedora a shot again.
My problem with the Raspberry Pi is that it's not truly open - there's a binary bootloader and graphics driver, and the SoC is undocumented. If I wanted to write my own operating system from bootloader to windowing system, I'd have to do a lot of reverse engineering. That's kinda why I'd prefer the Beagle Board.
GNOME 3 is the first desktop I've used in a long time that actually tries to do something fundamentally different and better, and, you know what? They've more or less succeeded. I'm glad to see the open source community actually try something different, interesting, and better.
Yes, GNOME 3 is wildly different from the traditional WIMP interface, but once I got used to it, I really think it's the best desktop experience I've had since my NeXTstation days.
The National Orphan Foundation (www.orphan.org) has a named scholarship program. If you donate to the program, 100% of your donation goes directly to the students. You can dictate the requirements for the recipients of the scholarship (four year school, public/private school, major, religion, whatever). Every student in the program aged out of the foster system, meaning that they did not have a family at the time of their eighteenth birthday and therefore don't have a support network.
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If he filled up his thermos with water from the bathroom sink, would that be theft as well?
I wouldn't mind so much except that the federal government also provides between $20 and $50 billion in subsidies to oil and gas companies.
What game, just out of curiosity? I remember reading about how Ant Attack was developed that way.
Looks like it's the end of the line for OpenVMS as well.
I would pay good, American money, to have OpenVMS open-sourced instead of just languishing like other DEC OS's. Why can't RSTS/E or RSX-11 be free? What could that possibly cost HP? Same with OpenVMS at this point. It's a great system, and I would love to see it available to average joes.
Someone who isn't as lazy as I am should start an "Open Source OpenVMS!" petition.
Someone really needs to explain the appeal of Kubuntu and KDE to me. I just don't get it. It's so *busy*: everything is huge with glowing drop shadows and spinning cursors and animations everywhere. It's also the only desktop environment I've ever sat down at that I couldn't just use immediately - I tried "creating an activity" and was left with a completely blank desktop, not even any panels or anything. There may have been keyboard shortcuts to get out of that situation, but I didn't know them and shouldn't have had to. I tried creating another activity later and the session segfaulted. This was a release version, not a beta or something.
I really want to like KDE, truly. I used KDE on FreeBSD for years, but eventually moved over to CDE on Solaris and then GNOME on Linux. I tried going back to KDE with Kubuntu 13.04 and had the above experience. So someone, please explain what KDE offers that I don't get through GNOME, Unity, XFCE, or Razor...
Most state laws (I'm assuming you're in the United States) allow for a DUI conviction if you are in "actual control" of a vehicle. That means if you're asleep drunk in the car and the keys are also in the car, you can be found guilty. If you're parked on private land and drunk, you can be found guilty. If you're in the driver's seat in an automated car and the car could be switched to manual control, you could be convicted of DUI if you're drunk.
That's what worries me. The transition to fully automatic cars needs to be essentially 100%, or at least 99% with a "pull over and stop moving" for the remaining 1%. Otherwise I would've be surprised if fatalities went *up* due to drivers taking a nap/getting drunk/reading a book and failing to notice when they need to take back over.
HDTV was the best thing to ever happen to laptop manufacturers. My CRT monitor in 1997 had a roughly equivalent resolution than my laptop today (1366/768). With the advent of HDTV, computer display manufacturers went out and rebranded everything as "True HD", implying to consumers that these are really high resolution displays because, well, HDTV is so much better than SDTV, a True HD monitor must be really great too! Hiding behind those letters made it easy to mislead customers about the actual resolution of their displays.
I would love to have a QHD laptop. Hell, I wish there were more than just a few 1080p laptops out there. The QHD laptops are finally starting to arrive, but they're slow coming. I wish I could get a Chromebook Pixel without the, you know, Chromebook part.
Now that Clang/LLVM has got this finished, I'm wondering what a system would look like with:
* Linux as the kernel
* Clang/LLVM as the system C/C++ compiler
* Heirloom Toolchest as the basic userland toolchain
* Wayland as the underlying display system
* musl as the system C library
That would be Linux, but would contain almost no GNU code. Not that I have anything against GNU, but the Heirloom Toolchest, Clang, and musl are all more standards compliant, smaller, and often faster than their GNU counterparts. I wonder what a Linux distribution like that would look like. I'd use it.
(I hate how "GNU's Not Unix!" is really becoming more and more true. Unix was about minimalism, and sometimes GNU seems like it's about stuffing everything possible into every tool.)
That right there says something. Ubuntu and Arch are at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of usability for new users.
Ubuntu is stuck between two communities: hardcore Linux users and everyone else. People complain about Ubuntu making user interface decisions, but you know what? Most people don't want an interface that's got a million different configuration options, they just want an interface that works. When they open up their settings, they want to see things like "Displays" not "LXRandR" which is inscruitable or "Gigolo" which is childish and uninformative.
Every "user friendly" distro I've ever looked at has been less user friendly than Ubuntu. The biggest problem I've noticed is a million different things in the configuration menu, each doing something slightly differently and with undescriptive names. A lot of users don't want to know what OpenBox is. Fedora is better in this regard by relying on GNOME heavily, but its installer isn't a polished as Ubuntu's and harder to use for new users, and its release and support cycle is too quick.
So that's the problem in a nutshell. Ubuntu is "too easy" (or, more charitably, "not configurable enough") for the hardcore Linux user and doesn't offer enough of an advantage over Windows or Mac OS X for the rest of the world. The average computer user just wants something that works, and doesn't know or care about "freedom" or "community". They see a computer for what it is - a tool to get their work done.
I personally use Linux because some flavor of Linux has been my primary operating system since I gave up my Amiga 20 years ago, and I use Ubuntu because it "just works" for the most part. I tried Fedora for a long time, but the rapid upgrades were distracting, yum isn't as good as apt for removing installed dependencies on uninstall, subjectively the available repos aren't as good, and I *hate* Evolution. I used Slackware and Arch for a long time (dwm, mailx, and Firefox were for a long time my default environment), but then I found that I was spending more time dealing with quirks or "customizing" my machine than I was doing actual work. One day, I was writing a script that I was running from .xsession that would periodically check my laptop's battery status and call xdialog to warn me if the battery got to low when I realized what I was doing - I was writing a script to do something that every modern desktop system would do for me, and better. Same for trying to get hotplugging USB keyboards to work with always swapping Ctrl and Caps Lock. While it reminded me of my early days of Slackware on an old Packard Bell in 1994, I'm just too old to care about that anymore. I have work to do.
No, dissent isn't silenced - feel free to perform the necessary research, compile a paper, and, if it is well-researched, it will appear in the pages of Popular Science.
Dissent just because you disagree with something isn't science, it's just opinion. A magazine that prides itself on bringing science to the masses doesn't want people who have a misunderstanding of what science even is skewing the results. Science isn't based on opinion. There are plenty of parenting websites that ban you if you suggest vaccines cause autism, for example. If you want to discuss things that aren't supported by evidence, feel free, but do it somewhere that isn't reporting science.
Yes, but if something groundbreaking comes about that shakes the foundations of evolutionary theory, it's going to be published in Popular Science, not posted in its comments section.
You know what I find interesting - when you think about the scale of Linux and how much innovation it has spurred, how diverse and vast its install base is, Linus is more of a "job creator" than Mitt Romney or Rand Paul, but for some reason they think they should pay less in taxes than he does, percentage-wise.
A very large number of cloud servers out there are running a bunch of Java applications inside a single application server inside a single JVM. The entire Linux kernel, virtual filesystem, daemons, user commands, etc, are just along for the ride. Having a barebones operating system that is just enough to run a JVM application server would fill a need for a lot of people. It's not a panacea and it's not the right choice for most virtual servers out there, but for some it makes a whole lot of sense.
I find it funny that some people just *hate it* when new things come out that do something in ways different from how they've done them in the past. In the thread on GNOME and Wayland below, some people just can't understand why we shouldn't continue to use X11 for the rest of eternity since it works now. Some people in this thread don't understand that even though Linux works well for virtual servers, sometimes for some applications, this might work better -- and that it's okay that that's how things are!
It's not that Wayland does a whole bunch that X doesn't, it's that X has a lot more hoops to jump through to keep going. Wayland just presents what amounts of a framebuffer and a simple protocol to let the compositor and clients communicate about size changes, movement, available displays, etc.
All of the modern graphical environments and applications are using the COMPOSITE extension to X, which adds an extra step to a lot of graphical operations. Plus, to be "X", you have to support things like the old X line-drawing primitives, fonts in the server, and other things that simply aren't used anymore. Important things like changing the screen resolution are kept in protocol extensions that you have to check for before using. Large amounts of code and protocol are dedicated to working with screens of vastly different capabilities - everything from monochrome monitors to "true color" displays. Nobody has a fixed-sized monochrome X terminal anymore, but the code has to account for it still.
Plus X stores a ton of things in the server, making it big, slow, and a source of potential security/information disclosure issues. Wayland stores less and does less.
In other words, developers are hamstrung having to maintain and work around lots and lots of very old code that will never, ever be used by a new application, ever, but has to be there, even though it slows things down, takes up space, and makes things more complicated.
Personally, I would've liked to have seen something more like "make COMPOSITE a part of the core X protocol and deprecate lots of things" and see X slowly evolve into a more "modern" system, but that's just me.
As for GNOME - I realize that GNOME 3 is different from GNOME 2, but I'm at least happy that for once the Open Source community *tried something different* instead of just aping Windows or Mac OS X (though GNOME 3 is obviously inspired by the latter). Maybe it worked, maybe it didn't, but at least we can claim to attempt to lead, instead of just blindly following.
The problem with Crouton is that anyone with a Google account has complete access to the chroot. All they have to do is login with their Google account, and then hope over to the chroot. The Crouton chroot is owned by the "Google Chrome User", of which there is only one, shared by all the Google Accounts on the box.
Even barring that, using Crouton still means sending data to Google, which I don't like.
I bought a Chromebook for my mother-in-law. For her, it's absolutely perfect: she can't break it too badly, there's essentially no risk of malware, updates are installed automatically, and it's got a keyboard. All she needs to do is read email, look at pictures of her grandson, and surf the web.
As for me, I want a Chromebook Pixel, but wiped and running a full distro of Linux...the hardware is gorgeous.
Not that peanut and gluten allergies don't exist, but in the past few years I've gone from knowing no one with either to running into people everywhere with one or the other. Seriously, I work with three people with gluten allergies, one guy with a peanut allergy, and the waitress who served me at a restaurant last night told me she'd never had the sandwiches there because she had a gluten allergy. Menus are popping up everywhere with gluten free options.
Schools are setting themselves up as peanut free areas and banning all peanut products even though the number of severe food reactions in a country of 310,000,000 is less than 2000 a year, with fewer than 150 deaths from all food allergies in all age groups combined. More than ten times as many people die falling down the stairs every year, but we're not mandating that schools be single-story. The rate of deaths by firearm for school-aged children is far far higher (second most likely cause of death for high-school aged children after car accidents), but we don't ban guns from homes with school-aged children or prevent school-aged from going to friends' houses where there are guns.
So, don't get me wrong - peanut allergies and gluten allergies most certainly exist, but the response in lots of places has been all out of proportion to the risk involved. I wonder if part of it has to do with the easy accessiblity of compatriots via social media. We as a species like to panic about things. I'm not immune: when my son was born preterm (he's fine now) my wife and I went into what could only be described as folie a deux about his health.
I've tried for years to like KDE, and I just can't. It's too *busy*. It's the first desktop I've ever sat down at that I couldn't just use right away - I clicked on a button, and up popped "Activities". Creating a new activity left me with a blank screen and nothing to do. Everything is animated and glowing, with huge distracting icons and drop-shadows.
GNOME is all right. GNOME 3 might be weird, but at least it's trying to do something other than emulate Windows or Mac OS X. It's just too buggy for my tastes.
XFCE is all right too, but I was turned off by how haphazard and...unprofessional Xubuntu was. I didn't like having to explain to my eight year old nephew's mother why he was asking what "Gigolo" did, for example.
Unity, despite its many faults, comes with Ubuntu. Despite *its* many faults, Ubuntu is the only open source OS I've used that actually seems like an integrated product. With Unity on Ubuntu, you don't get things like "Gigolo" which is just stupid or "lxrandr" which is inscruitable. You don't get a million different ways to customize things down to where you can make your desktop look like an angry fruit salad. That may or may not be a good thing.
Also, say what you will about Mir but Ubuntu is at least trying to make an integrated system. The other desktops are really poorly integrated with the rest of the system, resulting in my having to explain to my father "No, you're using Debian" "I thought I was using Linux" "You are, it's the Debian distribution" "Why is this called GNOME Terminal then?" "That's the desktop environment" "This says I'm using X windows" "That's the underlying display architecture..." Users of Windows don't know what GDI is unless they're looking for it. Same with Quartz and Mac OS X.
I hate to say it, but the non-baseline-Ubuntu distributions are not really doing a great job of making a desktop operating system. Like was said the recent thread on Fedora Core's newly-proposed model: they're just a bunch of products from different people thrown together into one mass. I appreciate the amount of effort the distributors go to, but Ubuntu has gone just a little bit farther and made something that feels like a modern, unified operating system. Some people don't like that, but a lot do.
...and looking, apparently they fixed that a while ago. Interesting. I'll have to check it out.
So the only thing that keeps me from using Fedora is yum. I do a lot of "experimental" or "temporary" package installations. I want to try out a new editor or a new programming language or something, so I do an installation. All of the various package managers will automatically pull in the dependencies, which is great, but yum doesn't uninstall these dependencies when I uninstall the original package. So, say I install something that requires 9803942834 dependencies. When I uninstall it under Debian, all those dependencies leave with it - when I uninstall it on Fedora, I still have 9803942834 - 1 packages laying around. It's annoying. Get that fixed with yum, and I'll give Fedora a shot again.
...how was what I said a troll?
My problem with the Raspberry Pi is that it's not truly open - there's a binary bootloader and graphics driver, and the SoC is undocumented. If I wanted to write my own operating system from bootloader to windowing system, I'd have to do a lot of reverse engineering. That's kinda why I'd prefer the Beagle Board.
(Disasbuse me of this notion if I am wrong.)
GNOME 3 is the first desktop I've used in a long time that actually tries to do something fundamentally different and better, and, you know what? They've more or less succeeded. I'm glad to see the open source community actually try something different, interesting, and better.
Yes, GNOME 3 is wildly different from the traditional WIMP interface, but once I got used to it, I really think it's the best desktop experience I've had since my NeXTstation days.
The National Orphan Foundation (www.orphan.org) has a named scholarship program. If you donate to the program, 100% of your donation goes directly to the students. You can dictate the requirements for the recipients of the scholarship (four year school, public/private school, major, religion, whatever). Every student in the program aged out of the foster system, meaning that they did not have a family at the time of their eighteenth birthday and therefore don't have a support network.