Just putting this out there in case it helps.

I shifted from being a Debian (or Debian-based) distro user (as my primary desktop OS) for about 16 years to Gentoo. Best move I ever made. No systemd. No pulseaudio. Emerge just works and I can even get picky about what features are compiled into an application with a good ebuild.

I've only been on the Gentoo train for about 6 months now, but I'm not looking back. You're right though that the pickings are slim for a distro which still adheres to a unixey philosophy. If you like a BSD, you'll probably like Gentoo -- portage is heavily based-on/inspired-by BSD ports, for one. You just get an OS which is slightly less esoteric (read: you can get precompiled binaries for applications where the source isn't available and broader driver support; I'm not hating on BSD -- indeed, I also heavily considered a flavor (Net-, PC-, Open-) before Gentoo - this is just my experience).

Yes, I miss the Debian I cut my teeth on. I even miss Ubuntu 4.whatever through 10.whatever, which was just Debian with a nifty installer and easier access to some of the trickier parts as well as more up-to-date software than Debian stable without the periodic oddness of Debian unstable/testing.

But I really don't miss longer boot and shutdown times with systemd (vs openrc in parallel mode) or my audio daemon bombing out randomly (so often, in fact, that before I shifted, I had clean-reloaded twice (clean Ubuntu and then, out of desperation, back to a clean Debian vanilla), and finally, out of frustration, wrote a shell script to periodically poll if the pulseaudio process was running, and, if not, start it up, followed by restarting XFCE's sound manager, which would be totally lost by the whole process. A totally unecessary hack, since the whole of PA is totally unecessary (for regular users who don't need fancy baubles like network transparency of the sound daemon), as I can now attest.

Ok, so the WIndows memory management can blow a little, but...

* warning about submitting login details over a non-secure connection: FF is actually taking user security seriously.
* smaller code == less chance of bugs and security holes. FF comes in at 194mb compressed and Chrom(e|ium) comes in at just under 500mb. Most is third-party stuff, which won't have the same eyes put onto it.
* smaller code == quicker compile. Not an issue for most, but on a source-based distro, I'll take 25 min over 2 hours any day.
* extensions that I want, that always work the same across platforms; this includes Firegestures and DTA. I can't find Chrome extensions to match them -- and I've really tried. The Chrome download managers are not really an improvement over the inbuilt stuff and the Chrome-based gesture extensions work differently across OSes. I like one tool that works at work (windows) and home (linux)
* a decent download manager extension (DTA). Since I grab files from a friend's seedbox, this is a bit of a must. Downloading several hundred rar parts without DTA is a real PITA

I could go on. I'm sure no-one cares. Still, FF will have users as long as I can breathe enough to tell other people to use it. I don't hate Chrom(e|ium) -- I use them for debugging (sorry, I *do* like the dev tools), but for a daily-driver browser? FF all the way. Or at least a derivative like PaleMoon, but I want the newer rendering engine and a JS engine which knows what a Promise is :/ It's 2017: Promises are not exactly "the new thing" -- ES2015 was, well 2 years ago -- and, whilst I applaud the PM devs (and truly wish I could continue using it), sites like GitHub don't do ES shims (I asked) and do rely on current JS features.

(ps: I know PM 27 (currently beta) does Promises; it fails elsewhere, unfortunately)

Great, if you can afford one or can even get one in your country. I'd take a Nexus phone any day, if Google found it within their hearts to sell them in my country. Until then, I rely on 3rd-party ROMs to get me away from shitty vendor ROMs and closer to the original AOSP -- though also, I'll take the extra features like theming, thankyouverymuch.

In particular, Gentoo. I did (very seriously) consider a BSD -- but would have always preferred a linux distro because I can get Steam working and I saw that the BSD kernel was dropping Linux ELF compat for security reasons (which may make sense -- I'm not here to judge).

I used Debian (or a derivative -- Mint, Ubuntu, and, very long ago, Corel Linux, but we don't have to dwell on that...) for around 16 years. When my Ubuntu box started getting insanely slow, I thought it was perhaps time to just go back to vanilla Debian. Turns out the problems persisted there too. Long boot times (minutes when win10 would boot in about 30 seconds to a usable desktop). Longer shutdown / reboot times (even more minutes when, again, win10 on the same machine would shut down in about 15s). 10-30 seconds to open a freakin' Konsole session -- and it wasn't Konsole: the window would show, black, waiting for a prompt.

I honestly couldn't stand that my win10 install was faster in every respect than my Linux install on the same hardware. It's just not right.

I put some research into which distros supported OpenRC. Arch does -- but it's not the default. Gentoo does -- and it's the default (and you don't need it if you don't want a masochist's desktop).
Yes, there's no pretty installer. There's a handbook and it's very informative. No, Gentoo is not about to woo casual desktop users and sub-par "administrators" who couldn't install grub without a lot of babying, but Gentoo gave me back my i7 3770 with 16 Gb RAM -- once again, I have a machine which is a total pleasure to use, even with a heavy desktop like KDE (plasma5).

I put up with the audio latency of PulseAudio in Debian because it meant I didn't have to learn the voodoo of .asoundrc files for dmix (turns out: you don't need 'em! dmix works out the box on now on cards with no hardware mixer, no configuration required!). Yes, PA has other features (unifying soundcards so your app can output to all of them -- stopped working for me, never managed to get it working again; network transparency (how many people actually need to project sound across a network?!) and per-application volume control (which people claim to love, but seriously, most of us just change the master volume if an app is too loud / soft, mainly because that's immediately available and the per-app volume control is a few clicks away).

PA also had annoyances (apart from the latency) like not remembering the default device and being plain flaky (so much so that I seriously wrote a cron'd script to bring it back up again because it crashed so often).

Then I heard that the same banana was taking over the init system in the most non-UNIX way possible and I just held on for the ride. I didn't want to give up my beloved Debian.

About a month in to using Gentoo and I wish I'd done this at least a year and a half ago, when I lost my patience with my slow Ubuntu install and switched back to a (not all that much faster) vanilla Debian install.

Gentoo is (probably) great for the same reasons *BSDs are great -- heck, portage only exists because of the inspiration of ports. Huzzah! It's like I can have the benefits of BSD and Linux all at once!

Compiling your own packages can make you feel like a hero -- but it's not the reason why my system flies now (heck, even my browser (palemoon) is using about 1/10 the memory it was before (300-500mb vs 3-5 gig)). One reason is that you don't have to accept "features" (PA, systemd) that you don't want support for in your apps. The other reason is simply that that Poettering crapware isn't on my system any more.

And lo, but even the fruits of the heavens, Debian and Ubuntu, were infested with systemd, having not learned from the foreboding trumpet blasts of pulseaudio as it introduced latency and the ability to crash out where there was none before. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and many faithful did turn their backs on the once great tablets-o-truth, seeking out anything without that foul stench.

Personally, I shifted to Gentoo after 16 years on Debian or some derivative (Mint or Ubuntu, then back to vanilla Debian). PulseAudio was flaky enough. Systemd just pushed me over the edge. So long and thanks for all the fish. Perhaps when the Debian world remembers something of the UNIX philosophy and provides a path to use OpenRC (or similar) and purge pulseaudio, I'll come back to the promised land. For now, it's the land down under where women glow and men plunder.

Totally. Competition is the whetstone which sharpens these tools. Also, Chakra is aiming to run on more diverse platforms (think IoT, etc), so that's also good: encouraging V8 devs to step up their game.

It's the same reason I used to cheer on Opera and why I'm rather sad they just threw in the towel. Who's going to set the ACID benchmarks now? Especially as FF loses ground?

Competition is required for successful evolution (:

Whilst I applaud the effort (and welcome alternatives), Chakra isn't quite ready for prime-time on other platforms yet -- more specifically, node-chakra. What it does, it does blazingly fast -- outpacing the v8 core on 6.3.1 -- but there are some specific use-cases which just end in fail, and a commonly-occurring message about buffers not being used in an expected manner.

Next release maybe? V8 needs the competition and I'll gladly take whatever is tops out stability, then features, then speed. I'm not a brand-whore.

This was certainly the case with the state-owned Telkom in South Africa. Privatization of that particular behemoth led to better service and prices for consumers.

So there ya go! Proven (in my one, totally-proves-everything case (: )

Seriously though, I'd side with you mostly, but not in Africa where government is an infrastructure to facilitate back-scratching and palm-greasing, all the while conning the masses into voting for the same criminals over and over. It's taken South Africa over 2 decades to get to the point where the majority are starting to lose their trust in the criminals they voted in.

Hell YES.

I'm a dev. I'm not afraid of some shit breaking. The day that I'm afraid of shit breaking on machines which only affect me (and have no alternative plan!), I should quit being a dev. Because chances are, that shit broke because of me (:

But honestly, though, I use the Win10 fast ring on my work machine (and 1/2 the dual-boot at home). Updates at least once a week -- and the current builds boot mofo fast and are more responsive -- so I'm getting a pay-off.
If something goes super-south, I can always find respite on a secondary machine (my laptop, unused workstation at work) because the code is not isolated to my "primary" machines. My development environments are available on all machines that I can access (or can be installed trivially).
I also use nightly CM builds on my phone -- because, if worst comes to worst, I can restore (from Titanium Backup) onto a prior build which I can download at anytime; time cost: around an hour, of which only about 15 minutes actually requires my attention. Once again, I get a pay-off: my ancient i9300 is running the latest Marshmallow builds and hasn't been faster (or more secure).

The cry to avoid bleeding-edge OS builds because of security is faulty -- where do you think the security fixes happen first? Certainly, I get to see the fix commit logs when I update my Android device. I also get to see them in Win10 build logs. I don't have to bother for Debian because stable is normally patched quite quickly for security threats.

I don't install previews on my pre-schooler's gaming laptop -- because then I'd have to maintain it. I don't install a testing Linux distro on my home machine's Linux boot because that has to (reliably) keep my tv series up to date and no-one wants to face the wrath of the wife when we don't have the current series (and I have, thanks to some creative fuxing by Poettering. I used to run Ubuntu latest (and before that, Debian testing) when there weren't people hell-bent on breaking the fundamentals of the OS).

But on my machines -- hell yes.

Disclaimer: I am a complete Update Whore.

Can I now have a dark theme without needing a high-end GPU?

Because that was an unexpected requirement previously.

TFA seems to suggest that 32-bit compat is out too (by the suggestion to run 32-bit processes in containers / virtual machines).

If this is also the plan, they can take a long walk off a short pier. There are plenty of 32-bit images still out there (Steam games? Other stuff) which work just fine.

I've already ditched Ubuntu, going back to Debian simply because my system rotted through updates to the point where sound was a hit and miss affair. This just gives a solid reason not to care about Ubuntu any more. Pity, as it's "home-grown" for me )':

For a short 7 years if the reserve is all that it's cracked up to be and if consumption doesn't increase (ha! not a likely behaviour from our species).

Basically all functionality comes from extensions (even the 'built-in' functionality). And extensions *can* be written as 64-bit (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/2016/01/04/64-bit-visual-studio-the-pro-64-argument/). So what's the big deal, fellas? The built-in extensions don't need the extra address space -- it's normally costly (but often helpful) extensions like R# that do. Even in a solution with > 100 projects, I wasn't even pushing a gig.

This is much ado about nuffin.

Boo-hoo, some people don't like show [X]

If a woman rated some "made for men, show boobies and do crass jokes" show as shit, that's her right to do so. For her, it IS shit. For a lot of men, so is Sex In The City. Or are you only allowed to air your opinion if the creator deems you worthy?

Retro-futuristic. It's a style that has worked successfully for many films and games. Perhaps the sub-conscious clash intrigues our primitive brains?