And that, in a nutshell, is why I disagree with the original submitter: choice -- even a *lot* of choice -- is not a bad thing! I use both a Mac and a couple of Linux boxes. I'm running Unity (my least favorite desktop) on one Linux box, Gnome 2 on another, Blackbox on a third...all of them have advantages and disadvantages. You really like the Mac, but although I like it too, if I had to pick Mac or Linux, I'd stick with my Linux machines. But then again, I'm not hugely into eye-candy; I tend to prefer lean and functional, even if it's not as aesthetically pleasing.

Off-topic: that's got to be one of the funniest sigs I've seen in a while :)

Last time I looked at Dia, it had a ways to go before it would be a decent replacement for Visio. That was quite a while back, though, so it might be worth checking into again :)

That would depend upon what everyone else perceives as "broken." That's a question that hasn't been clearly defined yet, so for those of use who are using -- and happy with -- Linux, "How would you fix the Linux desktop?" is a begging the question.

In a corporate environment, sure. A home user just buys a new computer.

^^THIS^^

It is neither an insult nor an offence to me if Windows or OS-X or OS/2 or Haiku or...or...or... works better for you than Linux, even though Linux is my OS of choice. Use what meets *your* needs! As long as you aren't asking me to support your computer, I'm cool with you using whatever OS works best for you.

I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 as I reply to you, and while there are indeed many, many things that I use the CLI for, changing screen resolution isn't one of them. My nVidia drivers (which certainly have their share of problems) come with a GUI app to do that; even on my ATI or Intel carded machines, I don't use the CLI to change screen resolution.

I did have to use a live CD to turn off the GDW login on one machine so I could boot into a CLI to fix a borked nVidia driver after I lost power during an upgrade once, but IME, Windows didn't always deal gracefully with a power loss during upgrade, either. And yes, there are certainly buttheads on many of the forums, but there are also a number of users who are truly helpful. It's pretty rare that I run into an issue on a Linux box that a half hour with Google can't solve...but then again, I've been using Linux for over a decade, now.

Well, yes, but...

A computer is a tool. If the software I need is only available for Windows, much as I loathe it, guess which OS I am going to use? Fortunately, there aren't very many Windows-only apps that I need to use (Visio comes to mind), so I own a couple of Linux boxes and a Mac, and at work, I use Visio on a terminal server from my Linux laptop. However, that isn't true for a number of other users here. One example is our billing software, but that's not the only example.

For the home user, I don't see much of a barrier to Linux adoption, other than inertia (unless you are a gamer, in which case, we are back to the "which OS supports the software I want to use?" question).

Care to explain why you think that someone who is happy with Linux is part of the problem? Like Hatta up above, I've been using Linux since around 2001, and it does just about everything I want/need it to do. It's a Swiss Army Knife, IME, so I agree with him.

Yes, the original submitter kind of alluded to desktop fragmentation, but I haven't really seen that as a problem. You can still add QT/Trolltech/whatever-KDE-is-using-now libraries to Gnome, if you want to run an app that was built for KDE and you can load GTK libraries on your KDE desktop if you want to run GTK-based apps. It seems to me that Linux gives you the ability to write the apps with the libraries you want, and the end user can install the appropriate libraries to run those apps -- in other words, it gives both the developer and the end user the flexibility and freedom to do what that want. Most modern distros will even handle the dependency checking for you, so it's not like adding additional libraries are beyond even a n00b's abilities. Consequently, I don't see that fragmentation is a problem, but I'll admit that as a Linux network admin, I may not have the best grasp of the problem from the average home user's perspective.

Only in the short term (in the case of your own code). If it's my guys writing indecipherable code, then, yeah, that's not your fault, and I wouldn't hold you responsible for it. However, if it's your code that's indecipherable, I'll probably try to find someone else next time.

I apologize; I misread your comment. In hindsight, what you posted was quite obvious but I was just being especially dense that particular day.

That's a good point, and I (obviously) hadn't considered that :)

Ah. I didn't realize that. Thanks for educating me :)

I wonder if that has anything to do with the recent /. story about the FAA re-examining the usage of portable electronic devices in flight...? Nah, couldn't be.

Yes, but in this case, "enough devices" is something like 281,474,980,000,000 network interfaces, unless my math is off. That's something like 46,000 network interfaces for every man, woman and child on the planet.

Even counting every network interface in every cellphone, laptop, desktop, server, router and switch that I have ever owned, administrated or even *touched*, I don't think I'm anywhere near my share of network interfaces. While I have no doubt whatsoever that there are people whose network interface count is higher than mine, I still suspect it's safe to say that if I'm not anywhere near that count (as a network admin), then there's no way the average number of network devices in use is anywhere even remotely near that number.

Dude, chill :) I'm a Yank too, but I didn't get that out of TFS* or anyone else's posts here. There is a difference between what is implied, and what is inferred. I think you have *inferred* far more than the author intended.

* in true /. tradition, I didn't RTFA, so if TFA more explicitly blames Americans, then I respectfully withdraw my comment.