Ok, yeah, that's where you completely went of the rails lol....

A better place to begin is by gathering information. The more information you have, the easier it will be to draw good conclusions. Otherwise you are stuck asking questions like, "why else would they do it?"

Maybe, but it's a complete fail on discoverability.

No! They are leaving the features, but focusing on making a sensible default, whereas the rest is easily discoverable!

That is how he is describing it, and it is how an ideal UI should be. Gnome on the other hand wants to make anything hard impossible, not discoverable (where discoverable means the user can figure out how to do it).

The R9 280 certainly doesn't count as low power (250W), the R9 285 is considerably better in that department (190W) and got some newer features to boot, with a $249 MSRP it should just barely squeeze inside your budget. To stay in your budget limit the nVidia alternative is GTX 760, but I wouldn't buy a Kepler card today, too hot and too noisy. Unfortunately there's not a Maxwell to match your specs, there's a gap between the GTX 750 Ti (which wouldn't be a performance upgrade) and GTX 970 (which blows your budget at $329).

Personally I was very surprised by the GTX 970 launch price though, the GTX 980 @ $549 was as expected but the 970 delivers 13/16ths of the processing power with the same memory size and bandwidth for over $200 less. I bought two to use in a SLI setup, in the games that scale nicely it's a kickass value. I suspect that by December this will have had some market effect at the $250 price point too, so I'd say check again then. Asking for advice 2-3 months out in a market that changes so quickly doesn't really make much sense.

Which is funny since I left the iOS world this because things stopped "just working."

Yes; "if you're just willing to get your hands a little dirty and muck in and learn then you can bend the hugely complicated interface to your needs" they'll say; they'll complain that your just not willing to learn things, and thus it is your fault. Such people will inevitably state that they are "power users" who need ultimate configurability and are (unlike you) willing to learn what they need to to get that.

They will inevitably deride GNOME3 for it's complete lack of configurability. Of course they'll gloss over the fact that GNOME3 actually exposes pretty much everything via a javascript interface and makes adding/changing/extending functionality via javascript extensions trivial (GNOME3 even has a javascript console to let you do such things interactively). Apparently actually learning an API and coding completely custom interfacdes from myriad building blocks is "too much work". They are "power users" who require a pointy-clicky interface to actually configure anything. Even dconf is "too complicated".

For those of us who learned to "customize our desktop" back in the days of FVWM via scriptable config files calling perl scripts etc. it seems clear that "power users" are really just posers who want to play at being "super-customised". Almost all the modern DEs do have complete customisation available and accessible; some of them just use a richer (scripting) interface to get such things done.

Indeed.

The Life Cycle of the Internet.

"Those who fail to learn the lessons of the past are condemned to repeat them."

While you do have a point, I'd counter that there's no way to do anything with a computer unless there's an interface for it. For example if you go to Burger King 90%+ order as-is from the menu. But there's all sorts of simple instructions like "no onions" you can tell a clerk that you can't tell a computer. If you go to Whopper Lab you can see all the options of buns, patties, dressings and toppings available in none, light, normal and extra quantities and so on that would totally overwhelm the average customer. If the interface didn't exist, the option wouldn't exist but any given option will be the default something like 99.9% of the time.

I like being able to manage my computer, I don't like having to micromanage my computer unless there's a specific reason to. I consider having obvious buttons to find more advanced controls to be discoverable, not that you need to throw every option in my face to say hey, you could change this behavior if you wanted to. If it's possible to set a sensible default and I haven't seen a reason to go looking for it then I don't need to know. Non-discoverable features I consider things like touching corners that don't have any hint they have actions, buttons with no obvious function/that don't look like buttons, shortcuts you can't find except looking them up, type to search with no hints and so on.

That said, I generally prefer an expanding/alternate dialog over a multi-step dialog. If I know I need to go into the advanced settings every time because I'm the 1% using that function I'd rather have the ability to pin it to expand/use the advanced dialog by default, meaning it should be a superset of the basic dialog not just the extras. Since we're already in an advanced dialog having a checkbox "Use advanced display by default" at a standard location wouldn't hurt. Go into the advanced dialog once, check that box and next time you go straight to where you want to be. It is usually far more user-dependent than situation-dependent, so I think that'd work well for most everybody.

One of the big differences between archiving and backup is that in archiving I want to keep this exact version intact, if it changes on me it's an error while a backup takes a copy of whatever is now - maybe I wanted to edit that file. Unlike backups I think it's not about versioning, it's about maintaining one logical instance of the archive across different physical copies. Here's what I'm thinking, you create a system with three folders:

archived
to_archive
to_trash

The archive acts like a CD/DVD/BluRay and is read-only. So far, nothing but a really awkward way to create a WORM(-ish) drive, but the real point comes next in distribution and synchronization.

When you put a file in "to_archive" a job will pick it up and wrap it in AES (with AES-NI the cost of on-the-fly encryption/decryption is very slim) and create a torrent-like file for it and move it to archived. If you want to delete it from the archive, you drag the file to the "to_trash" folder or maybe you put some kind of lock/freeze/undo timer on that function. Files that are in "archived" are sync'ed to other computers - still encrypted - which means you can shop around for storage/bandwidth, maybe you got multiple locations yourself (home/cabin), maybe swap backup with friends or family or you can buy it on the open market and they'll all mingle and share data because it's based on basic torrents.

They can all do basic limits on size/bandwidth so you can have pricing plans and caps, you can have one-way "leeches" that download and archive it on tape that can physically deliver it to you. If you build it fairly smart you can also have local, offline backups and if you restore them it'll pick up that 95% is the same as last week and sync up the rest. Basically a "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Archive Locations." It will leak a little bit of metadata as to size and number of files, but not file or directory names and you can probably muddle that metadata up with padding and dummy files if you want.

Of course you can choose to have the AES key on several computers so you can access your media from any of them. And as a free bonus a device that has the AES key like say your cell phone can use this as an online library, it doesn't have to auto-sync everything. With many locations = many peers it won't matter if one is down and you aggregate up the bandwidth, just like in any other torrent swarm. Through the seed/peer numbers you can at any time watch the state of your backup in progress as you add files. If your computer goes to shit, tell it the archive key and it'll hook up and start syncing. Just like a torrent client you can set priorities on what to download first.

It's not for all your data, but I think a lot of common user data is that way. Those RAW photos or video or audio you took? Archive them, "single" everlasting master copy. It doesn't replace backup of say documents you're working on or source code you're developing but it complements it.

Because it's not feature complete (otherwise Microsoft wouldn't keep adding features), it's not stable, and the free implementations aren't completely compatible.

You can have trouble opening a .doc from a few years ago......

I don't have to, I do build complex systems.

Essentially, you need proper separation of concerns, otherwise your system will become too unwieldy to handle. That is the basic principle here, and on the surface, it seems like systemD is violating it. As a result, systemD eventually will become a mess (if it hasn't already). Maybe the surface appearance is deceiving, sometimes that happens.

Seriously though, if all you want is an easier way to read through logs, why not just get splunk?

Realistically, by the time the SEC gets around to doing anything, the money is already long gone (Enron, Madoff, etc).