I actually logged into Slashdot again for the first time in years to post on Apple's products:

The iPad Pro is the Surface done right, and I say this as much as I admire the Surface. Apple has copied liberally from MS; stylus, side-by-side windowing, folding keyboard, and it's done well. The keyboard eliminates the need for a kickstand, the stylus is good enough for artists and the 12" display means you don't need a laptop anymore along with the windowing improvements. Sucks for those who bought a MacBook.

The new iPhone finally has a resolution that is usable in low light. Apple has always had very good cameras on its iPhones and this takes it one step further. It's still a mobile camera with a tiny sensor and a fixed lens, but those have gotten very good in recent years. Not yet quite as good as Samsung S6, Motorola X Style, LG G4 or Sony Z5, but Apple is not usually about choice. The force touch is a very useful addition, but will be mostly useful for 3rd party apps, gaming etc. However, since the Huawei Mate S has it as well, it's only a matter of time before it's standard on all mobile platforms.

The new Apple TV that now offers an SDK for developers is something that will be extremely useful. The Apple TV is already the best device for screen sharing in terms of quality. It even works well with Windows with 3rd party AirSquirrel. The devkit will enable developers to make even more useful presentation tools, which is where the Apple TV really shines. For home, there are many other options that are just as useful.

Of course you would still be locked into Apple's ecosystem, which is the main reason I avoid Apple's iOS products.

I recently had the opportunity to compare modern American comics with Franco-Belgian comics( "Bandes Dessinées"), and one thing that struck me almost from the beginning was the way that the majority of American comics seemed to involve fantasy characters and worlds that had very little whatsoever to do with reality, especially with respect to the physical universe.

I realise this doesn't necessarily mean anything, but it did certainly make me wonder.

I use it as well. Very nice for a Debian distro and none of the hassles.

I too dropped Ubuntu for Mint. Much happier now.

Honestly, this shit is ruining the industry

I wish Microsoft lots of luck trying to find talented employees after they implement this.

That alone should make you a happy panda.

Take a look further down that page to the section Breakdown Per OS, Non Mobile. You'll see that Ubuntu 10.04 LTS eclipses all the other Ubuntu versions by quite a healthy margin (an order of magnitude, in fact). 10.04 was the last version to use Gnome 2 and it's the last version that was non controversial and extremely popular.

Even Fedora is set to overtake Ubuntu. Bye, bye, Mark.

I wish I could mod you up. You've stated almost everything I wrote in a post further up, including MS and Shuttleworth's panic stricken chaotic run to mobile paradigms because Apple and Android were successful instead of sitting back and making small but useful steps. According to distrowatch, Ubuntu is about to be overtaken by Fedora of all things, and stability and usability aren't even its hallmarks. As for MS, the conceptual chasm between the Metro side of Windows 8 and the classic Windows dekstop is going to make MS many, many enemies in big enterprises, where they've already eroded a lot of the entrenched CIO support because of the Vista debacle and the retraining needed for the Ribbon interface. I can easily predict that those enterprises which can migrate apps to the web will do so and the march towards things like ChromeOS will only grow.

Mint is currently the only Distro that is both easy to use, looks good and offers users choices that other distros don't. On top of that, the choices that Mint offers are polished, something which only Ubuntu did well until the clusterfuck that is Unity arrived.

Taking a closer look at the distro watch stats, I see that there are a number of distros that are going to overtake Ubuntu in the near future. Even Fedora with its Gnome 3 mess and its buginess is starting to overtake Ubuntu. That is how unhappy users are with it.

The sad thing is that Mark Shuttleworth will ignore all the signs of decay until developers start not bothering to package or test for Ubuntu and business partners start not returning calls because they're back to talking with Red-Hat or maybe even the Mint people. It blows me away how stubborn the man is. The signs are so clear that Unity as it is currently implemented is a failure and he refuses to budge and thinks that tablets or mobiles will use a clunky, broken GUI paradigm when Android and Chromium OS already have the open source mobile market cornered.

Sad, truly sad.

Mint is where it's at, right now. I'm on LMDE and XFCE and staying there, but Clem and the others are making enormous strides in making MSGE everything that Gnome 3 wasn't.

I wish I had mod points to mod you up. Yours was one of the most balanced posts on the whole UI/Distro episode I've read in a long time. I'm an XFCE Mint user, simply because I need to work and the way Ubuntu keeps on jumping around with new and more painful ways to do things slows me down and wastes my time, I feel.

Personally, I think Ubuntu is heading towards the death spiral. They're still very popular because of word of mouth inertia but it's pretty obvious that that is slowing down and Ubuntu's wish to head for tablets and mobiles ignores the fact that Android dominates the open source tablet OS market completely and is in no danger of being overtaken by Ubuntu ever.

We'll see what happens.

And unhealthily close to the obsession of a cult as well.