Ridiculous! I've been using Emacs for almost two decades as a sysadmin and developer and use the control key combinations thousands of times a day. The arthritis and RSI have never gotten in the way of me being able to do my job in any significant manner.

Honestly, I do find the Ctrl+[ key combination more ergonomic than removing my fingers from the home row to hit the escape key.

This is because Android users don't have as much to be proud of.

Until we can get full lossless music download in flac or something similar, I'll be sticking with optical media. If you have good hearing, a decent stereo and care, the compression artifacts in mp3/aac/ogg can be very distracting.

I've been using Linux since '94 and I've used nearly every major desktop environment at some point along the way. In my experience, the biggest problem KDE has isn't features. KDE is everything I actually want in a desktop (other than using minimal resources like traditional window manager fluxbox). The problem is that the environment is buggy and/or unstable. Every once in a while, I will try to use KDE as my desktop and I will only last a few months before going back to Mate/gnome2, XFCE or something like icewm. The list of odd behaviors would be too long to post here but I've had endless problems with Kopete, Kmail, Korg, Konq (browser) and many others. In comparison, I can leave up a gtk based desktop for weeks to months at a time without thinking about it with a similar compliment of apps (Pidgin, Tbird, FF, etc.) and rarely run into any weirdness.

They have the features, they just need to really nail down the stability, clean up the cartoon fonts, and set the default settings to something more usable. Admittedly, I'm overdue for a test run of plasma 5.

I'm with you. Slackware-64 on my primary computer. There are many non-rpm/non-deb based distributions out there.

Suck all the joy out? "Inheritance encapsulation and polymorphism" is where the fun begins!

If you're that serious about audio quality, you shouldn't use any on-board analog audio. Either use S/PDIF or go with an external DAC.

It's different because you can only play the downloaded tracks through their app. I'm pretty sure that the app keeps track of the play count and reports back to the mother ship when it reconnects to the internet.

Seriously. If Slashdot, of all places, can't have a reasonable conversation about the science behind this topic without the deniers dominating the discussion then there really is no hope. We should just defund any climate research and put all that money into coal and oil discovery and extraction research. Game over. Why delay the end point? It's not like there's any political will to do anything serious about it anyway.

...nevermind.

ZFS is seriously cool in many ways, but you pay for that with some pretty significant RAM requirements for a file system driver. If I remember correctly, you need about 8GB of RAM to really make use of ZFS. I think it's great that they're including it with the distribution, but it wouldn't make sense to have this as the default file system. At least not until the average system out there is running with 16GB of RAM.

This seriously annoys me. I've heard management call for us to do more with less, be above average or seek the best solution and then require us to implement "best practices." How can you not see the contradiction with that.

I'm a little late to the party. Since I've been here a little while, I thought I'd throw in my $.02. Hope you're still reading this thread. What I'd like to see in no particular order:
1. https support
2. Beef up YRO with more posts - there's absolutely no shortage of material on this one.
3. More Free software/OSS news. Remember, it's news for NERDS.
4. Less politics unless it applies to #2
5. Overall, the site seems to have trended to more superficial posts over the past several years - I'd like to see more depth in the articles.
6. Clean up the spelling and grammar. Seriously, it's not that hard to proofread a paragraph or two before going live. We're mostly adults here and it makes the site look very unprofessional. This was better 15 years ago than it is now.
7. I, for one, welcome our new overlords. Please, don't kill the trolls. The hot grits, Natalie Portman, ...in Soviet Russia, goatse links etc. all add to the unique culture of the site. Seriously.

As a kid, I liked to keep a drawer full of socks of various colors. It's endless fun to figure out the minimum number of socks I'll need to take out of the drawer, in the dark, to be sure I have a matching pair.

I still use (Al)Pine as my every day email program. It is still maintained and works well. Once you've learned just a few of the key bindings, it is very efficient for reading as well as doing general message and folder management - much, much faster than a silly GUI interface.