Odd. I don't understand why people even use RAR anymore when there's 7z.
Because 7zip is kind of crap really. Not only is it quite slow, it also has absolutely no redundancy or recovery build in what so ever. A single flipped bit will quite literally destroy your whole archive, same with an incomplete 7zip that is missing some bytes at the end. RAR on the other side doesn't mind a flipped bit, with build in recovery data it can fix that and even without it that data will only affect a single file, all the other files and what is left of the damaged file can be extracted without a problem.
7zip for me is a classic case of completely over engineering in one direction (good compression) while completely forgetting the other one that is much more relevant for real world use: People want to get data that they put into an archive back out again.
For example, if I am writing to a tape drive, using an archive format with the index at the end is a *terrible* idea and much slower than tar or cpio.
Yeah, but so is using a linear storage archive format for a random access media. Tar certainly has its uses, but that it is used for distributing source code and other stuff on Unix systems is really nothing more then a historical accident, a proper format designed for that use would look very different.
The simple fact is that all the shiny modularity of combining tar, gzip, bzip, par, gpg, cat, split and whatever to reproduce rar's features still doesn't give you basic random access to the archive, something I consider an absolute critical must-have feature for any archive format, as otherwise all the cool user friendly things, such as mounting an archive transparently into your directory tree become impossible or at least extremely slow when dealing with large archives.
I mean its not even rocket science to see the limitations of tar, take a directory of a few tens of gigabyte, tar.gz it, and then let tar show you all the files in the archive. Very basic usecase and tar utter fails at performing it at anything close to tolerable speed.
There are perfectly cromulent tools for that without rar: you can just split a file with split and compute "checksums" with md5 and sha1.
RAR can not only have a checksum, but also optional redundancy, so that it can automatically fix a few flipped bits. RAR is also able to extract incomplete archives without problems unlike say 7zip where an incomplete archive becomes completely unusable. Unlike the gzip/tar mess RAR is also able to seek, thus you can extract the last file in the archive without first uncompressing, which is extremely useful when dealing with big archives. RAR also compresses extremely well.
Simply put, I haven't seen any other compression format that has all the features and robustness of RAR.
Its the lack of eyes that can focus on things within an inch or two in front of them.
Duh, of course you don't just stick LCDs in front of your eyes, you have to put a proper lens in front of them and then your eyes can focus on them just fine.
VR gear has existed for decades, the problem is just that we still don't have any that is both good and cheap. The resolution on the affordable stuff is still complete crap compared to your cheap ass monitor from 15 years ago, i.e. you only get something in the range of 800x600 or 640x480, nowhere near the 1080p you expect from a modern display.
A dock is a window switcher + app launcher rolled into one,
Except that it currently really sucks for switching windows. For example none of Gimp's non-image windows (toolbar, brush dialog, etc.) get shown in the thing, making it essentially impossible to grab Gimp and throw it onto another workspace, as you would end up with only half the application on the other workspace.
I am also not much a fan of that launcher thing to begin with, I wouldn't mind it as an option for some of my apps, but having it forced on all of them is extremely annoying. As with terminals I want to start a new one when I click the button, not switch to the last one. I also have quite a few shortcuts that just do simple console commands like make a screenshots or switch to higher or lower gamma, those completely do not fit in the launcher paradigm, they just confuse the thing as it doesn't now what to do with applications that start and finish in a second. Also I simply need lots of buttons for those, the dock however just has way to large icons to handle that.
That's why I would have much preferred it when they would have all that stuff as additions to Gnome2. I would have absolutely loved the ability to turn a Gnome2 launcher into a "single instance" Gnome3 launcher as an option, but having it forces as the only way to start apps is annoying as hell. And as said, maybe those kinds will we worked out in a year or two and Gnome3 will be ready for use, but its not quite there yet.
Dude, you are looking for how to change your login options, how hard can it be?
Let your grandma try it and see how long it takes.
You assume that the user knows exactly how the system works and exactly how to do the change he wants to do. That's not the case with most users, especially with pieces of the system that they haven't touched in a long long time, if ever. At best they are going to Google for a fix, but even that of course doesn't work either when your OpenGL driver is glitching out.
As I said elsewhere, my MacBook Pro with Nvidia card worked very well.
Great, but that really doesn't say anything. The important part is not how many things you can find where it works, but the cases where it doesn't. And so far I had issues with OpenGL on almost every single dist-upgrade on Ubuntu, across multiple computers with different cards from different manufactures. OpenGL is still far from a dependable thing on Linux, yeah, you can make it work just fine, but new Xorg versions, kernels or driver upgrades break it pretty regularly.
You are aware that if the card/driver does not claim to support OpenGL, Ubuntu does not try to use it, right?
That obviously didn't help much with my ATI HD5670 card.
You are missing the point. I can fix my problems just fine. Its the users that can't and for which the upgrade is turning into a really shitty experience. With that latest release Ubuntu has basically removed a lot of the trust people had in it. It is no longer the friendly OS that "just works", but the one that will throw a half working beta releases in your face and wreak your system in the process. Not exactly an OS that I would ever recommend to any non-tech-savvy users, unlike all the previous releases.
For that you need to know that you can find that stuff in the Log In dialog in the first place. As said, if you use auto-login you likely haven't had a need to touch anything login related stuff in years. Also a feature that basically trashes the whole users desktop should simply never be installed without warning or asking. A little "Do you wanna use Unity?" with a few screenshots and explanation how to disable it wouldn't have hurt. Its just stupid to push such an unfinished and huge change on the user without warning, easily the worst I have seen in a Linux upgrade in basically ever.
And no, OpenGL is not completely unrelated, it is very much related, as it means that not only the GUI changed, but became completely unusable, even unrecoverable when you weren't familiar with console stuff. Again, given that OpenGL has a long history of just not working very well for a ton of people, its just really idiotic to make it a forced default.
You would be right if it was "forced" on you with no alternative.
We have to wait and see how long Ubuntu will offer the regular Gnome2 install, at the moment, sure you have the option, a few releases down the line I wouldn't be so sure. Especially when Gnome3 makes it into Ubuntu (the Gnome3 packages currently break both Unity and Classic Gnome). As said, we already kind of been there with the Gnome1 to Gnome2 switch and back then there wasn't an option to go back to Gnome1. You either had to use Gnome2 or throw away your distribution and go compiling things yourself.
Yes, you can disable it at the login screen, but many people never see the login screen due to auto-login and OpenGL driver issues might screw up Unity so badly that you can't even get to the login screen or just outright crash your machine.
we may have something that is a lot better than Gnome 2 ever was.
Might very well be the case, but that will takes years, years in which we might be forced to use an inversions user interface (yeah, we already had that with the Gnome1 to Gnome2 change). My main problem with Unity/Gnome3 isn't that they are trying something new, but that they essentially throw everything else away while doing so. Why not have the Apple dock-clone as option you can use, not at thing you must use? Why take the freedom away to have multiple freely configurable panels? Why not have the global menu as an option?
At the moment Unity feels like a thing that adds nothing of value, but removes a lot of features which I consider absolutely essential.
That's not the first screen you see, thats the screen you never see if you have used Ubuntu for a long while, as auto-login will have you completely bypass that screen.
This is an entirely configurable option. Users who like it will keep it, users who don't will switch it.
The problem is that it is a forced changed, you get shitty Unity even when you never asked for it. Yes, you can switch it off, but two things make this hard: The option is only well hidden in the GDM login, so most people might not even realize that it is there (auto-login makes you completely bypass that screen and that the option only becomes visible after you clicked on your name makes it easy to miss even when you see the screen). Second problem is that Unity requires OpenGL and OpenGL drivers have the tendency to be broken in Linux, especially after a dist-upgrade. For me I couldn't click shit in Unity, the GUI was one single large graphical glitch, had to do some console hacking to switch away from Unity. Yeah, I can do that, but for people not so familiar with console commands that turn into basically a reason to give up on Linux.
The problem is that Gnome3 is essentially the same as Unity, its basically just a slightly better implementation of all the same concepts, with all the same problems. You still have zero support for applets, no option for a taskbar, no launchers in your panel, no additional panels, etc. And of course both of them require OpenGL support, which I find quite frankly completely baffling given that my OpenGL drivers basically broke on every single dist-upgrade for the last few years.
Could you elaborate on that? Since his problems mirror very much those that I encountered when using Lua. That's not to say that Lua is bad, it is certainty a very small clean language, but I had easier time writing C interface code in other languages (you however run into plenty of slightly different problems with them too).
The most simple alternative would be single-use credit card numbers and while some credit card companies offer those for single transactions, they don't offer them for recurring transactions, i.e. you want a number that only allows Sony to get your money, but not anybody else. Those a stolen Sony-only number would be completely useless.
I mean seriously, we are living in a age of hi-tech and yet still let so much depend on a single number that you can't even keep secret, as you have to give it to anybody from whom you want to buy.
The reality is that there's no single app that will propel Linux into the mainstream magically,
A single up won't make Linux mainstream, but not having that single app can very certainly hold it back from ever getting there, as people want an OS that can serve all their needs, not just 90%. The second you give people a reason to boot back into Windows, Linux will become that toy OS again with which they might play around once in a while, but which they won't actually ever use for their daily use.
Think back to when PulseAudio was released. Many people had the same arguments.
The difference is that Linux audio is a mess and always has been, current Gnome is not, it is actually quite functional. But instead of improving that, they throw it away and reinvent it, with a whole swoop of new bugs, missing features and other crap.
Thats really by far the biggest issue Linux has: Every few years people reinvent the shit from scratch, never does it get to a point where the user interface stuff is actually fully featured and stable.
Also the introduction of PulseAudio wasn't exactly great either, making sure that it for example works proper together with OpenAL would have been nice instead of breaking a whole swoop of Linux games. Ubuntu Sound Preferences are still kind of an incomplete joke.
So you're surprised that a window manager that has (relatively) VERY few users does not get a lot of attention? WTF?
The problem isn't that the window manager doesn't get attention, but that large parts of the Ubuntu desktop get turned into a monolithic blob instead of a lightweight reusable components. Thus the only way to do some things is by using the whole Ubuntu blob at once, if you want to replace a single component the whole house of cards collapses.
Take Unity, if you don't like parts of it, your only option is to discard it pretty much completely. Having it nicely work together with older Gnome parts or using only parts of its features doesn't seem to be part of the plan. Its an all or nothing deal.
I think the real problem people have with Unity is that they don't like change.
What people don't like is crappy software, incompatibilities, removal of features and tons of bugs and Unity has more then plenty of any of that. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the core concepts of Unity, as that is basically the exact same way as every other OS out there works, the problem is that it is really bad and incomplete in actually doing what it tries to do while also wreaking havoc to a lot of important features that worked just fine in the past.
Why for example did they have to replace the panel with a different panel that looks pretty much the same, except it can't do anything that the old panel could do (creating multiple panels, allowing applets, etc.)? Wouldn't it have made a hell of a lot more sense to simply allow the current panel to contain the menubar as option? Same for the dock thing, why does that have to be a special incompatible gadget thing, why can't it extend the current function of the classic panel? Why can't I have applets in there? Why is the configuration so limited?
There is nothing wrong with change, but change should be done to improve and fix things, Unity doesn't do any of that. It simply shuffles things around and breaks a lot in the process.
Nuts and bolts are an essential part of user experience, long before we get to the graphics/design stage
Very true and that is exactly why Unity is bullshit. It improves little to nothing, yet introduces a whole swoop of new bugs in incompatibles for no other reason then looking a little more hip and more like OSX. I would much prefer it when they would focus on making what they already have work proper.
The simple truth is that the whole "desktop experience" hasn't really changed a whole lot in the last 20 years, you click icons to start stuff, you push icons around to move files, etc. Its how Windows does it, its how MacOSX does it, its how the Amiga did it an pretty much everybody else. Small improvements here and there are nice and good, but what matters most is simply that what you have works properly and works for the tasks at hand, not just sometimes, but always and Ubuntu simply doesn't. On numerous upgrades the OpenGL driver killed itself, subpixel rendering is currently broken for me, network configuration also leaves a lot to be desired and multi monitor support while tolerable, but anything but great.
The forced Unity UI was easily the worst upgrade experience I had in Linux for quite some years, probably even worse then the switch from Gnome1 to Gnome2. Only thing that makes it somewhat tolerable is that so far it can be completely switched off, but it still seems to be an extremely stupid choice to force the UI on users via a dist-upgrade.
The problem is that you can't have proper long term studies when the device is out for just a few month. At best you can do some extrapolation from past research, but I don't think you can really say anything definite about long terms effects of stereoscopic images, when there really isn't much real data to work on. 'Near work' still doesn't seem to be ruled out as a cause of myopia, so I wouldn't be to surprised if stereoscopic 3D would have some effects on developing eyes when exposed a lot to it.
While the 3DS is certainly not N64 level (the old DS already kind of had that, sans the texture filtering), its graphical offerings are so far very uneven. Stuff like Resident Evil looks pretty good, but even some first party games like Kid Icarus look a good bit worse then what you would get from your 6 year old PSP and that is kind of a problem when you wanna $250 for the device while you can get a PSP for $130.
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Odd. I don't understand why people even use RAR anymore when there's 7z.
Because 7zip is kind of crap really. Not only is it quite slow, it also has absolutely no redundancy or recovery build in what so ever. A single flipped bit will quite literally destroy your whole archive, same with an incomplete 7zip that is missing some bytes at the end. RAR on the other side doesn't mind a flipped bit, with build in recovery data it can fix that and even without it that data will only affect a single file, all the other files and what is left of the damaged file can be extracted without a problem.
7zip for me is a classic case of completely over engineering in one direction (good compression) while completely forgetting the other one that is much more relevant for real world use: People want to get data that they put into an archive back out again.
For example, if I am writing to a tape drive, using an archive format with the index at the end is a *terrible* idea and much slower than tar or cpio.
Yeah, but so is using a linear storage archive format for a random access media. Tar certainly has its uses, but that it is used for distributing source code and other stuff on Unix systems is really nothing more then a historical accident, a proper format designed for that use would look very different.
The simple fact is that all the shiny modularity of combining tar, gzip, bzip, par, gpg, cat, split and whatever to reproduce rar's features still doesn't give you basic random access to the archive, something I consider an absolute critical must-have feature for any archive format, as otherwise all the cool user friendly things, such as mounting an archive transparently into your directory tree become impossible or at least extremely slow when dealing with large archives.
I mean its not even rocket science to see the limitations of tar, take a directory of a few tens of gigabyte, tar.gz it, and then let tar show you all the files in the archive. Very basic usecase and tar utter fails at performing it at anything close to tolerable speed.
There are perfectly cromulent tools for that without rar: you can just split a file with split and compute "checksums" with md5 and sha1.
RAR can not only have a checksum, but also optional redundancy, so that it can automatically fix a few flipped bits. RAR is also able to extract incomplete archives without problems unlike say 7zip where an incomplete archive becomes completely unusable. Unlike the gzip/tar mess RAR is also able to seek, thus you can extract the last file in the archive without first uncompressing, which is extremely useful when dealing with big archives. RAR also compresses extremely well.
Simply put, I haven't seen any other compression format that has all the features and robustness of RAR.
Its the lack of eyes that can focus on things within an inch or two in front of them.
Duh, of course you don't just stick LCDs in front of your eyes, you have to put a proper lens in front of them and then your eyes can focus on them just fine.
VR gear has existed for decades, the problem is just that we still don't have any that is both good and cheap. The resolution on the affordable stuff is still complete crap compared to your cheap ass monitor from 15 years ago, i.e. you only get something in the range of 800x600 or 640x480, nowhere near the 1080p you expect from a modern display.
A dock is a window switcher + app launcher rolled into one,
Except that it currently really sucks for switching windows. For example none of Gimp's non-image windows (toolbar, brush dialog, etc.) get shown in the thing, making it essentially impossible to grab Gimp and throw it onto another workspace, as you would end up with only half the application on the other workspace.
I am also not much a fan of that launcher thing to begin with, I wouldn't mind it as an option for some of my apps, but having it forced on all of them is extremely annoying. As with terminals I want to start a new one when I click the button, not switch to the last one. I also have quite a few shortcuts that just do simple console commands like make a screenshots or switch to higher or lower gamma, those completely do not fit in the launcher paradigm, they just confuse the thing as it doesn't now what to do with applications that start and finish in a second. Also I simply need lots of buttons for those, the dock however just has way to large icons to handle that.
That's why I would have much preferred it when they would have all that stuff as additions to Gnome2. I would have absolutely loved the ability to turn a Gnome2 launcher into a "single instance" Gnome3 launcher as an option, but having it forces as the only way to start apps is annoying as hell. And as said, maybe those kinds will we worked out in a year or two and Gnome3 will be ready for use, but its not quite there yet.
Dude, you are looking for how to change your login options, how hard can it be?
Let your grandma try it and see how long it takes.
You assume that the user knows exactly how the system works and exactly how to do the change he wants to do. That's not the case with most users, especially with pieces of the system that they haven't touched in a long long time, if ever. At best they are going to Google for a fix, but even that of course doesn't work either when your OpenGL driver is glitching out.
As I said elsewhere, my MacBook Pro with Nvidia card worked very well.
Great, but that really doesn't say anything. The important part is not how many things you can find where it works, but the cases where it doesn't. And so far I had issues with OpenGL on almost every single dist-upgrade on Ubuntu, across multiple computers with different cards from different manufactures. OpenGL is still far from a dependable thing on Linux, yeah, you can make it work just fine, but new Xorg versions, kernels or driver upgrades break it pretty regularly.
You are aware that if the card/driver does not claim to support OpenGL, Ubuntu does not try to use it, right?
That obviously didn't help much with my ATI HD5670 card.
You are missing the point. I can fix my problems just fine. Its the users that can't and for which the upgrade is turning into a really shitty experience. With that latest release Ubuntu has basically removed a lot of the trust people had in it. It is no longer the friendly OS that "just works", but the one that will throw a half working beta releases in your face and wreak your system in the process. Not exactly an OS that I would ever recommend to any non-tech-savvy users, unlike all the previous releases.
Seems quite unsurprising to me.
For that you need to know that you can find that stuff in the Log In dialog in the first place. As said, if you use auto-login you likely haven't had a need to touch anything login related stuff in years. Also a feature that basically trashes the whole users desktop should simply never be installed without warning or asking. A little "Do you wanna use Unity?" with a few screenshots and explanation how to disable it wouldn't have hurt. Its just stupid to push such an unfinished and huge change on the user without warning, easily the worst I have seen in a Linux upgrade in basically ever.
And no, OpenGL is not completely unrelated, it is very much related, as it means that not only the GUI changed, but became completely unusable, even unrecoverable when you weren't familiar with console stuff. Again, given that OpenGL has a long history of just not working very well for a ton of people, its just really idiotic to make it a forced default.
Which is neither obvious nor even possible when can't see anything beyond a whole bunch of glitched OpenGL.
You would be right if it was "forced" on you with no alternative.
We have to wait and see how long Ubuntu will offer the regular Gnome2 install, at the moment, sure you have the option, a few releases down the line I wouldn't be so sure. Especially when Gnome3 makes it into Ubuntu (the Gnome3 packages currently break both Unity and Classic Gnome). As said, we already kind of been there with the Gnome1 to Gnome2 switch and back then there wasn't an option to go back to Gnome1. You either had to use Gnome2 or throw away your distribution and go compiling things yourself.
Yes, you can disable it at the login screen, but many people never see the login screen due to auto-login and OpenGL driver issues might screw up Unity so badly that you can't even get to the login screen or just outright crash your machine.
we may have something that is a lot better than Gnome 2 ever was.
Might very well be the case, but that will takes years, years in which we might be forced to use an inversions user interface (yeah, we already had that with the Gnome1 to Gnome2 change). My main problem with Unity/Gnome3 isn't that they are trying something new, but that they essentially throw everything else away while doing so. Why not have the Apple dock-clone as option you can use, not at thing you must use? Why take the freedom away to have multiple freely configurable panels? Why not have the global menu as an option?
At the moment Unity feels like a thing that adds nothing of value, but removes a lot of features which I consider absolutely essential.
in fact it's the first screen you see.
That's not the first screen you see, thats the screen you never see if you have used Ubuntu for a long while, as auto-login will have you completely bypass that screen.
This is an entirely configurable option. Users who like it will keep it, users who don't will switch it.
The problem is that it is a forced changed, you get shitty Unity even when you never asked for it. Yes, you can switch it off, but two things make this hard: The option is only well hidden in the GDM login, so most people might not even realize that it is there (auto-login makes you completely bypass that screen and that the option only becomes visible after you clicked on your name makes it easy to miss even when you see the screen). Second problem is that Unity requires OpenGL and OpenGL drivers have the tendency to be broken in Linux, especially after a dist-upgrade. For me I couldn't click shit in Unity, the GUI was one single large graphical glitch, had to do some console hacking to switch away from Unity. Yeah, I can do that, but for people not so familiar with console commands that turn into basically a reason to give up on Linux.
The problem is that Gnome3 is essentially the same as Unity, its basically just a slightly better implementation of all the same concepts, with all the same problems. You still have zero support for applets, no option for a taskbar, no launchers in your panel, no additional panels, etc. And of course both of them require OpenGL support, which I find quite frankly completely baffling given that my OpenGL drivers basically broke on every single dist-upgrade for the last few years.
Could you elaborate on that? Since his problems mirror very much those that I encountered when using Lua. That's not to say that Lua is bad, it is certainty a very small clean language, but I had easier time writing C interface code in other languages (you however run into plenty of slightly different problems with them too).
The most simple alternative would be single-use credit card numbers and while some credit card companies offer those for single transactions, they don't offer them for recurring transactions, i.e. you want a number that only allows Sony to get your money, but not anybody else. Those a stolen Sony-only number would be completely useless.
I mean seriously, we are living in a age of hi-tech and yet still let so much depend on a single number that you can't even keep secret, as you have to give it to anybody from whom you want to buy.
The reality is that there's no single app that will propel Linux into the mainstream magically,
A single up won't make Linux mainstream, but not having that single app can very certainly hold it back from ever getting there, as people want an OS that can serve all their needs, not just 90%. The second you give people a reason to boot back into Windows, Linux will become that toy OS again with which they might play around once in a while, but which they won't actually ever use for their daily use.
Think back to when PulseAudio was released. Many people had the same arguments.
The difference is that Linux audio is a mess and always has been, current Gnome is not, it is actually quite functional. But instead of improving that, they throw it away and reinvent it, with a whole swoop of new bugs, missing features and other crap.
Thats really by far the biggest issue Linux has: Every few years people reinvent the shit from scratch, never does it get to a point where the user interface stuff is actually fully featured and stable.
Also the introduction of PulseAudio wasn't exactly great either, making sure that it for example works proper together with OpenAL would have been nice instead of breaking a whole swoop of Linux games. Ubuntu Sound Preferences are still kind of an incomplete joke.
So you're surprised that a window manager that has (relatively) VERY few users does not get a lot of attention? WTF?
The problem isn't that the window manager doesn't get attention, but that large parts of the Ubuntu desktop get turned into a monolithic blob instead of a lightweight reusable components. Thus the only way to do some things is by using the whole Ubuntu blob at once, if you want to replace a single component the whole house of cards collapses.
Take Unity, if you don't like parts of it, your only option is to discard it pretty much completely. Having it nicely work together with older Gnome parts or using only parts of its features doesn't seem to be part of the plan. Its an all or nothing deal.
I think the real problem people have with Unity is that they don't like change.
What people don't like is crappy software, incompatibilities, removal of features and tons of bugs and Unity has more then plenty of any of that. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the core concepts of Unity, as that is basically the exact same way as every other OS out there works, the problem is that it is really bad and incomplete in actually doing what it tries to do while also wreaking havoc to a lot of important features that worked just fine in the past.
Why for example did they have to replace the panel with a different panel that looks pretty much the same, except it can't do anything that the old panel could do (creating multiple panels, allowing applets, etc.)? Wouldn't it have made a hell of a lot more sense to simply allow the current panel to contain the menubar as option? Same for the dock thing, why does that have to be a special incompatible gadget thing, why can't it extend the current function of the classic panel? Why can't I have applets in there? Why is the configuration so limited?
There is nothing wrong with change, but change should be done to improve and fix things, Unity doesn't do any of that. It simply shuffles things around and breaks a lot in the process.
Don't forget to:
sudo apt-get purge liboverlay-scrollbar.*
Or else that abomination of a scroll bar might stuck around.
Nuts and bolts are an essential part of user experience, long before we get to the graphics/design stage
Very true and that is exactly why Unity is bullshit. It improves little to nothing, yet introduces a whole swoop of new bugs in incompatibles for no other reason then looking a little more hip and more like OSX. I would much prefer it when they would focus on making what they already have work proper.
The simple truth is that the whole "desktop experience" hasn't really changed a whole lot in the last 20 years, you click icons to start stuff, you push icons around to move files, etc. Its how Windows does it, its how MacOSX does it, its how the Amiga did it an pretty much everybody else. Small improvements here and there are nice and good, but what matters most is simply that what you have works properly and works for the tasks at hand, not just sometimes, but always and Ubuntu simply doesn't. On numerous upgrades the OpenGL driver killed itself, subpixel rendering is currently broken for me, network configuration also leaves a lot to be desired and multi monitor support while tolerable, but anything but great.
The forced Unity UI was easily the worst upgrade experience I had in Linux for quite some years, probably even worse then the switch from Gnome1 to Gnome2. Only thing that makes it somewhat tolerable is that so far it can be completely switched off, but it still seems to be an extremely stupid choice to force the UI on users via a dist-upgrade.
There do seem to be studies - and proper ones
The problem is that you can't have proper long term studies when the device is out for just a few month. At best you can do some extrapolation from past research, but I don't think you can really say anything definite about long terms effects of stereoscopic images, when there really isn't much real data to work on. 'Near work' still doesn't seem to be ruled out as a cause of myopia, so I wouldn't be to surprised if stereoscopic 3D would have some effects on developing eyes when exposed a lot to it.
While the 3DS is certainly not N64 level (the old DS already kind of had that, sans the texture filtering), its graphical offerings are so far very uneven. Stuff like Resident Evil looks pretty good, but even some first party games like Kid Icarus look a good bit worse then what you would get from your 6 year old PSP and that is kind of a problem when you wanna $250 for the device while you can get a PSP for $130.