Yeah, I think we have moved on. Sad truth is that Slashdot is not the place it used to be.

For real news about stuff that matters, I now mostly rely on Ars Technica, Anandtech, LWN and The H. They pretty much cover most things I'm interested in between them.

And if Google Reader stats that I see are any indication, in terms of users and traffic, Slashdot is just a shadow of itself these days.

Am I the only one here who actually likes Unity?

I've tried multiple graphical environments through the years, from Windows 3.1 and NeXT, to BeOS and XP and KDE (2, 3, 4) and Gnome 2. Every one of them introduced new concepts, some of which worked, some didn't, but I don't understand what the big deal is adapting to a new interface. For a long time, the the Windows 95 start menu concept was thought of as a solid, and KDE 2 and 3 and Gnome 2 to a certain extend, adapted it and enhanced it, but basically followed it. Usability studies are however showing that the whole layer under layer of options isn't the best way of organising things, which is the reason behind KDE 4's menue, Ribbon interface in Office, as well as launchers such as Launchy and Gnome-Do.

The other thing that power users are deriding is lack of options and customisability. Sure, options are good and power users like making their desktiop their own, but we have to realise that for a general purpose system, evey option has a cost. Cost in terms of support, cost in terms of number of things that can go wrong, or that the user can mess up. Now, I am not saying that we should remove all options and preferences, and sometimes systems go too far (for example Gnome 3 has gone too far in my opinion) but these things take time to settle down. Sometimes the bendulum swings too far one way, then the other, until a balance is found with which most users are happy. Give it time.

For a bunch of tech-savvy intelligent people, I find the slashdot crowd's utter resistance towards any UI change baffling. Rarely, even in corporate environments have I seen so much change resistance. It seems like some of us formed our UI habits in early 90s, and are so attached to them, we just can't think of anything different. It's just a new UI people! And it's a bit different, and it's not perfect, but surely, like everything Linux, it will get better overtime. Like it or not, trying new things is a sign of innovation, which is the sign of a healthy eco system.

Try NewsRob. It syncs with Google Reader and is just a pleasure to use.

I know you were trying to be funny, but GT3 RS with a sound system? Seriously?! It's like setting emacs with vi key bindings. Or setting bash as the default shell in NetBSD. It's travesty!

You pay $40,000 more than the normal GT3 for Porsche to rip out everything from the car to make it light, including the engine noise filters, GPS, adjustable seats, and the sound system. The engine and the chassis aren't that different between a normal GT3 and a GT3 RS. It's mostly the weight.

I assure you, that after you look at your bank balance and realise that it's $40,000 short cause you wanted to get rid of every last extra gram on your car, you will not be adding any weight to it. In fact, you'll soon be joining your local gym when you notice that you are not getting the claimed 0-60 times.

Oh well, I guess after 100,000 posts I still don't know that I shouldn't talk about cars here.

ChromeOS is a very good move for everyone involved. Remember, this OS and the devices it will run on are not targeting average slashdotters. I can personally vouch that I come across daily contact with people, business people not just teenagers, who don't use anything other than their browser. The worst aspect of a computer for them, is upgrading, updating all applications, viruses, malware, and general maintenance of the system. They nearly all fail in these, and after a year, they think their laptop is not usable anymore and go and buy a new one. They would LOVE this OS, and are they primary targets of it. Also, synchronisation between multiple computers is a bitch, that even they most fail at. And they hate leaving their documents here and there. Files and directories don't work for them, it's a broken metaphor for most people, and as much as love to organise my files in hierarchical directories, they simply don't care. They just want access to their information, when they need, as conveniently as possible.

I hate Web apps as much as the next guy on this forum, and even use my trusty IMAP client for fetching my emails from Gmail. But I can't deny that web apps are the future, specially when HTML 5 comes off age and becomes widespread. If you look back at what the Web looked like 5 years ago and compare it to now, you'll see that it will be irresistible in 5 years time. Have a look at http://www.chromeexperiments.com/ to get a taste of what we are looking at.

On a more general note, anyone who is comparing this to old failed projects based on thin clients, X terminals or net pcs, is missing the point. Yes, the technology behind this might be similar to those, but times are changing. On the one hand, people are getting used to ever-present always-available services. On the other hand, 3G is now widespread, affordable, and provides great utility for many. Laptops and phones are converging. 2007 was the year of netbooks, 2010 might be the year of smartbooks (running ARM processors). Smartphones are morphing into Internet tablets (e.g,, N900). These are very different, and interesting times.

Yes, this is cloud computing, and yes, it raises huge privacy issues. It is up to us the tech savvy crown to raise these issues and address them.

Slashdotters can always run their trusty Debian or Fedora or FreeBSD or on their computer. And they remain great choices. But Google is pushing applications to go online and cross browser. They are pushing for open source drivers. They are pushing for open standards and cooperation with upstream and downstream projects. This is a Good Thing (TM) for all of us, even if we are not the target consumers of this OS.

Well my user agent string right now is: (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.0 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.212.0 Safari/532.0), which says I'm running the latest Chrome very nicely on my Linux box.

If you are using Ubuntu, I suggest you give this PPA a try: https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa

It's daily builds of Chromium. I've been running it now for a week, and it has not crashed on me a single time. There is a x86 version, as well as a AMD64 version, and the 64-bit version is now true 64 bit, i.e., it does not depend on 32 bit libs.

It's stable and nearly feature complete. Supports all plugins (including Flash) out of the box, if they are installed on your machine. It imported all my settings and profile from Firefox. I like its original look, but it can now also use native Gtk themes of your system, so that it meshes really well with the rest of your system. It implements the one-process-per-tab architecture, and uses a *lot* less memory than Firefox. In fact, it is astonishingly more responsive and less memory-hungry than FF.

There are a few things left, for example printing doesn't work on it yet. Once they implement printing, I'm sure they will roll out the Beta.

Google is also working on an extension framework, so things as AdBlock will become a reality soon.

Give it a try, it's very impressive.