So if I send a message at 2:15 PM, and the recipient has his or her phone off for a while, but then has the brilliant idea to turn it back on at 3:30 PM while driving on the highway and starts using the phone and reads the message, then I'm at fault for the idiot's unsafe driving behavior a full hour and fifteen minutes before it happened? Just the idea of this is beyond fucked up. Here's an idea: Nail the idiots that drive with questionable habits. Not the people who not only aren't with them, but may not even know what they're even doing at a specific point in time to begin with.

You have some incredibly low expectations. When I use Linux, I am consistently amazed at how well everything works right from the start, even compared to some expensive Windows operating system. What distro do you use? Gentoo? Arch? Crux? Hell, even Slackware tends to work very well right after install with very little configuration necessary, and it comes with far more functionality standard (ie. less need to screw around finding, downloading, installing programs) than any operating system Microsoft has ever put out.

You wouldn't, but if it works, it works. That's the point. The masses just want something to work, and if it does then they're happy.

Here's something to try. Go ask all the Windows users you know if they ever bothered to even look outside of their comfort zone--Windows--and try something else. You might get a few "I tried a friend's Mac" or "I heard of it" or similar answers, but for the most part people will probably give you a blank stare. Why? Being traditionally a monopoly on PCs, everyone knows and has used it, and they think it works "well enough" and just don't know (or care) that there are alternatives. There may be something better than Windows, but most people don't care, because they "know" Windows and think they would be completely lost with something else.

And that is the great thing about Linux: if you want to, you can play around with every distribution and window manager/desktop environment you can imagine. But I wasn't talking about those kinds of people... hell, I am one of them myself, so yes, I was even excluding myself. I'm talking more reality here, typical clueless user who just wants everything to work without having to do anything, not advanced users and computer enthusiasts.

Way to go--you just ignored the first 2/3 of the sentence and commented only on the very last 1/3 or so of it--never mind the rest of the paragraph that it is a part of. Combine the two parts to read the sentence as a whole as it was intended, and if you comprehend it correctly, you'd realize that I was saying there is "absolutely no need to try out any others"... if what you have works well and does what you want to begin with. And in many cases and for many people, it just might. But as the rest of the paragraph hints at, it might or might not.

For practice, here was the original, complete sentence, emphasis added:

X comes set up and ready to go in any "desktop" distribution, complete with a pre-selected desktop environment and set of applications, so what are you talking about? If that one desktop that comes with the system pre-configured does the job as expected, then unless you want to explore, there is absolutely no need to try out any others. In Windows, you either like what you've been given after paying loads of $$$--or else. Just because you have the choice to try alternatives in Linux, doesn't mean that you *have* to evaluate all the others. The point of a distribution is to put together a pack software that is deemed to be useful and of good quality... the distribution maintainers have done the work for you, in many cases. Whether you agree with their selections or not, that's a different topic.

Meh, well it's no surprise that by ordering a computer from a company that also provides the operating system you will end up a system that's relatively well put together in terms of hardware/driver support in the OS. On the other hand, I don't want to live in Apple's walled garden and can't stand their business practices, so you can have your Mac and I'll just stay far, far away.

I've only extremely briefly played around with hibernate/suspend to disk, even less than regular suspend/sleep mode. Both modes in the BIOS were most definitely regular "sleep" modes. They only differed in just how many components they put to sleep. Hibernate is an interesting idea, but even it kind of irks me--in ways more than regular suspend. A can's bring myself to waste an entire 1GB on a swap partition just for the occasional hibernate, and that number is only going to explode with every new computer in the future I get.

There are also different suspend levels. I think they are labeled S3 and something else in the BIOS, with one being slower, more extreme in energy saving, and more unreliable. Don't know (or care) about the difference, but again, I haven't messed with sleep mode in years (and will not again until I get a laptop). Anyway, this could be the reason for the speed difference (I do recall calling both modes, and one was much faster than the other). Also, maybe a bit less likely, over the years coming out of sleep mode--if it has, I would never know, because again... I don't use it.

My problem is that I'm impatient: 5 seconds is too too for me to wait for a machine plugged into a wall outlet to become responsive, and all of my computers to date have been desktop machines. But I agree with you that standby is very important on a laptop.

I have never owned a laptop myself, but I likely will end up buying one at some point and have been considering what I will be doing as far as power management goes. I'm considering running the system 24/7 without the battery (to conserve it) and plugged into my desktop keyboard and monitor when it will be at home for a week or more at a time during which point I may turn off all power management features, and shut it down and plug the battery in when I leave, using various power saving modes when necessary... but I will still most likely just shut down whenever possible to get the biggest savings.

Overkill? More work than is typically done? Well, what can I say... I'm really, really not a fan of power management features, but I will use them when absolutely necessary, and even then only under special conditions. :p

If I'm going to have to wait anyway, the way I see it I might as well just go all the way and shut the machine down completely, saving the most battery when not in use for an extended period of time.

Back in the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s when I used Windows, I realized sleep mode was a complete joke, unreliable, and just stopped using it by the time I upgraded to Windows XP or shortly after. In Linux, I am still not a fan of waiting for the damn thing to "wake up" for 5-10 seconds before it will even accept my password, so the only component that ever even enters standby on my machines is the moniter (and this has been the case for over a decade, even dating back to my last years in Windows). Windows, Linux--doesn't matter what the OS is, not putting the system into standby makes the whole experience much smoother, faster and hassle-free.

On the other hand, though--it is a good thing this was fixed for those laptop users out there.

Oh, wait--I re-read your post. You are equating quality with popularity, which effectively renders your entire argument invalid because economics almost never really works that way, and I just wasted time on my previous post responding to what now looks like it was rightly labeled flamebait. Oops. Disregard my previous post.

Most people talking about Windows 8 since, well, long before it was even released were talking about how bad it sucks. So I guess according to your claims, Windows 8 and Linux are about equal on the desktop then. Although I would strongly disagree; it's 2013 and Linux has been pretty damn good "on the desktop" for years now. I switched to it from Windows XP back in 2006 and it improves all the time... and at this point, I would never switch back.

Meanwhile, on the Windows side you've got the usual increased bloat and system requirements, high prices and restrictive licenses, Vista brought in kernel-level digital "rights" management, Windows 8 prepares the ringing of the death knell of the traditional "desktop Windows" environment, which ironically I was under the impression that you were claiming was better in the first place. So, what happens when Metro becomes default and the traditional Windows desktop is gutted out of the system? Face it: it's going to happen. And to Microsoft, it can't happen soon enough.

Yep--it's even in the original announcement: it's a "Free Unix!" and a "new Unix implementation".
https://www.gnu.org/gnu/initial-announcement.html

I'm pretty sure the name was intended to be somewhat of a joke, and with their love of using recursive acronyms to come up with "clever" names (just look at the Hurd...) that's probably the case. But in a way the name is kind of ironic, and likely on purpose, because they weren't allowed to actually call the system "UNIX" and I'm sure they knew that, while at the same time it gets the point across quite well that it's not "really" UNIX--it is a clone.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple just kept the cash and didn't bother to get iOS certified. I can imagine it now; "Certified UNIX" in Apple's iOS advertising material, and people all around the world mock it and laugh at the concept of an OS designed for an overpriced trendy toy tablet/phone being advertised as certified UNIX. Why would Apple even waste the money? On the other hand, getting their main desktop/workstation/server OS "certified" makes more sense, and that extra bullet point in their advertising probably does actually help out a bit.

Personally, I think it's all a big joke--the entire concept of UNIX as a trademark certification. It requires a wad of money just to be considered which is the biggest problem (hey, you can buy your way into anything even if your product itself is not deserving of it... just wave the $$$). This leaves countless potential operating systems out even if they have technical advantages, leaving only a select few legally capable of carrying the prestigious UNIX name, and in many cases they really don't have anything truly special to make them worthy of that honor.

Hey, isn't that the kind of business of an abusive convicted monopoly? Oh, wait...