Since Microsoft is so good at ripping off other ideas, they might as well be consistent. Why not steal KDE for their next brilliant idea.

The latest Mint is a Debian based distro too. Much better than that crazy Ubuntu distro.

OpenSuse has as the default desktop KDE 4.10.1. It's a stable UI and very customizable too. I love it. I just installed it on a bunch of computers.

Shakespeare, in Henry IV, Part One, 1596:
Falstaff: 'The better part of valour is discretion; in the which better part I have saved my life.'

I'm with Billy Boy on this one. If there was one inkling of a national security issue, I would opt for a different choice than these Chinese companies.

Okay, I'm not a big conspiracy theorist. But if there isn't a good chance of a backdoor in their software, I'm a monkey's uncle. Aren't these companies partly owned by the People's Liberation Army?

Yeah, I know. But it is an improvement from the way things used to be. I only see this gaining inertia too.

I think Unions have been one of the biggest sources of Luddite thinking in many fields. I'm just guessing. But I'll bet the teacher's unions would not support a path of innovation that allowed for fewer instructors. Heck, if banks were unionized there wouldn't be any such thing as an ATM.

I now do much of my shopping online. If I want a pair of Levi 501's, it doesn''t matter where they come from. As long as it is convenient and cheap. This is what has been dooming many brick and mortar stores. If this is true for stores, it may be more so for brick and mortar schools. With online courses and lectures, much of the need to waste gas money and driving time has evaporated too. My youngest son is taking college math classes and more online from an good University. The cost is far lower for him and class size is almost irrelevant. This goes way beyond white boards and tablets.

The older I get, the harder it gets to fight off becoming a cynical old coot. I have wondered why the USA is militarily involved in a country like Afghanistan. On the surface it does not appear to have anything in the national interest. Sure there were some terrorist training camps there. From the sparse media coverage of this war, the country appears to be run by 7th century goat herders. The drone war has been flattening those bases and the bad guys over there for a while though. What has been peculiar is this:

Why do we have boots on the ground when drones are working so well?
Why are we spending so much effort at "Nation Building".

Well well well. It appears there is a huge deposit of rare earths that were discovered by some of our geologists. Try Googling "rare earths Afganistan". Some reports claim a trillion dollar cache of the stuff has been discovered. I suspect there maybe a larger deposit than that. Check out just this one article.

http://www.livescience.com/16315-rare-earth-elements-afghanistan.html

Me cynical? Naaaa.

I control my oven using DOS and DESQview with the command line. Weasels!

The system you have detailed could be inadequate. But I just read that the development system will have this:

The development-stage system in question is known as “Piston,” and it’s based on Xi3s X7A modular system. That system has a quad-core processor, up to 8 GB of DDR3 RAM, up to a terabyte of solid state storage and support for three monitors. The starting price for the X7A is $999. Again, those specs don’t necessarily reflect what’s inside of Piston, or what the price would be if it hit the market.

http://techland.time.com/2013/01/08/xi3s-piston-a-steam-box-emerges-sort-of/

There are lots of people claiming that the little SFF computer called the Piston does not have the power to adequately run Steam games under Linux. But I have Linux Mint KDE 14 AMD64 installed on an HP nx9420 laptop which is 5 years old. It only has a dual core 2.16GHz processor, the equivalent of an Nvidia GT 7900 GPU and 4GB of ram. I was playing Dark Descent, Team Fortress 2 and Killing Floor all weekend. It worked great. If this laptop will do this well, I'm sure that little SFF computer will be just fine also. I wonder if Valve will release them with a subscription like mobile phone companies do.

Granted, the license terms of FLOSS definitely has the look and feel of a socialist ideology. And yes, the military is very conservative. I actually am the father of two sons in the USMC. But aside from the politics (which makes me cringe) FLOSS is "open". One is free to dissect the code and alter it on a whim. I actually also think Windows 7 is a decent product.. I do not like 8 at all. But right now I am doing this reply using Linux Mint 14 KDE. With Microsoft as a partner, the software also becomes an extra security risk from an outside source. I wonder how much code is actually written in the US now and not outsourced to India or another county.

I am also not a Microsoft hater, as is fashionable in many circles. I just think this is a poor and expensive choice. It is not the job of the military to subsidize US companies either. Their job is to kill people and break things. I know this sounds brutal. But it is what it is.