I haven't tried this myself, but others are saying you need root to do this. If that's the case I'd say it's a serious issue if this is something that an admin would normally do; a superuser going out of his way to lock a system will find a million ways to do it.

I'm curious about this. What are those five steps?

I think right-clicking on an icon and selecting uninstall is intuitive to desktop users; it certainly was for me. And there's always Powershell :-)

I may be a loser, but at least I'm legitimately a loser!

(And there's plenty of proof of it too...)

A dialog that pretty much only appears when (un)installing software is hardly obnoxious in my opinion. Security popups may well be ineffective for most people, but as a power user I know when UAC prompts should and shouldn't appear; getting a prompt when one shouldn't pop up is a useful warning sign.

I also have to wonder whether Linux or the FreeBSD kernel are actually technically superior. Unfortunately I suppose very few people are qualified to answer; a thorough comparison would be an interesting read.

I didn't notice any change in my keyboard shortcuts or mouse gestures, thus no muscle memory retraining was needed. Maybe some icons changed shape or something like that, not a big deal for me.

Why would you need to reboot?

Could you elaborate on the (legal) issues you have with submitting patches to GPL projects? How could one end up in trouble doing so?

I think I learned about uBlock from someone's sig here. It accomplishes the same goal as Adblock Plus/Edge, but uses significantly less memory. A freshly launched Firefox instance with Adblock Plus (only one empty tab open) used slightly over 230MB of RAM; with uBlock that figure is down to around 100MB.

I too first started using Firefox when it was called Phoenix, but I disagree that Mozilla has failed. In my experience Firefox is fast and responsive. Resource-minimalness (is that even a word?) isn't an issue for me, as I don't think Firefox requires unreasonable amounts of disk space or RAM. Especially after switching to uBlock. I suppose RAM usage starts to matter more if you like to keep hundreds of tabs open; it's a valid concern but not relevant for me.

(I couldn't figure out how to get the micro sign to work on Slashdot.)

I can only conclude that you and I must be using totally different browsers despite both being called Firefox, because the one I'm using isn't in a "sorry state". Then again, I'm a weirdo who doesn't think a fullscreen start menu is a crime against humanity either :-)

It makes sense that a library that exists (duh, but was anything else available in 1998?), is free of charge, and does its job will become widely used. Has a technically superior future alternative ever taken over something that was available when needed? Makes me think of IPv6, but I'm not sure the comparison works.

It only takes a few seconds to find out it's an instant messenger, but I agree it wouldn't have been a bad idea to add those two descriptive words at the beginning of the summary. WhatsApp's popularity AFAIK is largely thanks to the fact it works on cheap "feature phones" as well as beefier devices. I like to keep things simple so I run WhatsApp on Android-x86 which in turn runs in Virtualbox on my desktop computer. :-)

Agoraphobia and anxiety disorders in general can absolutely be disabling and I wouldn't wish them on anyone. Also, where in the world is any disability benefit high enough for someone to buy even one car and enough gas to drive around leisurely? (Unless I misunderstood and your sister only bought the 4-wheelers and the RV after earning the money for them in a truly American way: winning lawsuits :-))

How and why did you suddenly turn this into Geeks vs "Normals"? The "geek" is included in people and has just as much (or little) say as anyone else. Besides that, I doubt it's only geeks who would enjoy less traffic noise.