alias yum="yum -y" Anyhow, I wouldn't call that "fit and finish" - I'd call it a poor design decision, if indeed that's how apt-get actually works - but if memory serves it does not though, and it prompts you before actually installing packages.

By that logic, laws or regulations can only ever remove freedom (since they are forms of requirements, either placed upon people or governments).

But laws and regulations often can prevent someone more powerful than you (or others) from taking away your freedom (and the freedoms of many others). So its obviously false that requirements always remove freedom. Sometimes they bestow freedom, or allow freedom to flourish.

And some would argue, such is the case with the GPL. It prevents those with more power and resources than others from removing freedoms, by imposing requirements.

It's only "too restrictive" if you accept the BSD concept of "software freedom". If you accept the GNU concept of "software freedom", the BSD licenses are "too restrictive" (ie. ultimately more freedom limiting). In other words, the term "software freedom" has a completely different meaning for a GNU-ist than it does for a BSD-ist.

As to which license is ultimately more beneficial, I think it depends on the software project (and the stakeholder one is talking about). Neither are one-size-fits-all. I'm glad the linux kernel is GPL. I'm glad things like Django are BSD licensed. I think it depends on the project and situation.

You don't have to be a developer to install gnome-tweak-tool - that covers just about everything you could do with gnome 2

I'm a gnome user and I love gnome 3. Quite simply, its awesome. Almost every single complain I see about the Gnome team supposedly "dumbing everything down", is a rather ironic demonstration that they actually didn't dumb it down enough - because the complaints are almost always shallow, wrong, or a demonstration of user incompetence and ignorance that could easily by attaining even a little basic working knowledge of gnome 3 (the kind of thing you have to do to use any computer software efficiently).

What's funny is, the behavior your describe about terminal windows is *exactly* how OSX behaves. Yet most of the world thinks its the best gui ever. In any case, all you have to do is put your left finger on the ctrl button as you click the terminal, and viola - new window. Not hard.

I can't for the life of me figure out how you must be using Gnome 3.

You certainly can you move your cursor to other windows to click on them, give them focus and raise them. Heck you can even do focus follows mouse, and autoraise, getting rid of the click.

Secondly, you don't have to click the word "Activities" at all. It's a hot corner. You're supposed shoot your mouse to it quickly. And the beauty of the hot corner is, you don't have to look for it or locate it on the screen, you don't have to aim for it or click it - you just whip your cursor up to it in a fast, imprecise motion - and voila - you have the overview. The targets there are also large, so you can don't have to be precise.

Or you can leave your left hand on the keyboard to hit the super-key...

Such a disconsolate digression! This accused pedant pontificator is really just a jocund jester. Sheesh!

... I woefully wonder if I'm the only one who has the fastidious feeling that the noritious names for Ubuntu releases are idiosyncratically idiotic and horrendously horrible

I know lots of definite UNIX non-noobs who like FFM (including myself).

FFM can be tremendously handy because you can send keyboard input to a window without having to raise it above the window that previously had focus. Perhaps that's not such a big deal when using big 27" and 30" monitors and you can always just put most windows side by side... but its awesome on smaller screens, such as those on laptops. It's even better on a laptop with a keyboard nub (read "keyboard clit"). Plus it can be easier to switch focus to a specific window when your alt-tab list has lots of open windows to cycle through, requiring you to hit tab several times.

Same here. Designers might be able to put a finer point on it, but the aesthetics of KDE are just wrong to me. Every toolbar is an explosion of ambiguous icons, the spacing between text, icons, menus, and all of its other interface components seems off, slapped together and amateurish. Dolphin, Konqueror and Kontact are among the worst offenders. And there's also bizarre method for configuring the dock, and the whole plasma thing I just do not get.

I get wooed every so often to try it again, usually on the heels of a new release. Then after a couple weeks of *really* trying, *really* wanting to like it, I abandon it. The same is that QT apps can be *really* beautiful and awesome (eg. QT Creator) - but KDE apps just aren't.

And aesthetic appeal is really important to me... the environment I work in all day has to be visually appealing as well as functional. No amount of theme and style tweaking seems to get me to a visually appealing place in KDE. And this has been a consistent problem for me as far back as the KDE 2 era and onward (never ran KDE 1).

Tramp will edit files in SSH - IMHO there's never a reason to use vim or emacs server-side, when you can edit remote files directly from both.

Of course there is....

But with evil-mode being such an amazing vi-like environment for emacs, for me, its really hard to justify vim anymore (even though I was a big vim guy for years). And org-mode rocks.

There are some nice plugins for vim these days though, that have no easy equivalent in emacs. Syntastic, for example, just works out of the box and does a lot of advanced things that emacs requires tons of lisp twiddling to accomplish... but oh well.

* You can make the menus in emacs display whatever option or function you want. Also, ido-ubiquitious mode will give you a fuzzy search on a meta-x. So if you can't remember the keyboard shortcut, perhaps you can remember (or guess) some part of the name of the function that does what you need, and quickly find it (with tab completion and everything) - probably even more quickly than you would by searching a menu.

* http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CuaMode

* Emacs 24 at least (less so in previous versions) has some very pretty themes (tango, misterioso, dichromacy, etc). I've actually grown fond of the aesthetics of emacs now. I used to loathe the look and feel of it too.

And some more points - it might be clear now, but pretty much any complaint or thing you can think of that you don't like about emacs - there's a damn good chance somebody out there has thought the same thing, and written some lisp to change it. With the new package.el being integrated into emacs 24, chances are you can grab the lisp package you need right from inside emacs.

Oh, and emacs has org-mode. Emacs is worth learning just for that alone.

Right - all the other "bastions" that are supposedly debunked and used everyday, over and over, and often together at the expense of logical coherence.

"But the earth isnt warming! Human's arent causing the warming! The warming is good for us, and CO2 is plant food! The earth isnt warming!"