Same here.

By default KDE loads too much services, most of which I never use. The same goes for its features, I use less than 20% of them. And those 20% of features can be duplicated by combining other pieces of software, most of the cases it will work better too. Back in earlier versions KDE was quite unstable too, crashing a few times a day, although that has improved greatly now. Last but not least, KDE is abit sluggish on my sandy bridge based laptop with 6GB of RAM, which is unacceptable as I expect everything to be as snappy as possible on this kind of hardware.

So, to sum up, I tried KDE and found it works but not as quite well as my other setup, so I abandoned it. Now I use plain xmonad, load a few gnome daemons such as gnome-keyring, gnome-polkit-auth or network manager, for other desktops app such as file manager I use those from GNOME.
PS: I couldn't stand GNOME 3 at all, Unity is okay but not optimal, XFCE lacks a few features such as per-folder-sorting-scheme, same goes for LXDE, KDE is the best out of them but still not as good as my current setup.

Why don't they use ogg vorbis instead? We don't have software patent here so MP3 is as free as Ogg Vorbis, but if they decided to be as free as possible (CC licensed) then the latter would be better.

alsamixer -c0 should let you config the first sound card of your computer, not PulseAudio switches. Note that sometimes you might have two hardware sound cards or more, in that case choose the correct one in alsamixer.

Regarding to system wide daemon, I have never used PulseAudio that way so I can't say anything, but running a sound server as root doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

Jack detection can be done in many ways, and different vendor have their own way of doing so, unless somebody get a hardware specification set for your sound card, I don't think it will be easy to fix.
And yeah, it is a driver problem.

But it will reduce the address space available for ASLR, am I right?

Why do you need low latency for typical music playback on desktop? It is only for audio professional doing mixing from multiple sources. For laptop users like me, saving 1 W means 5~10% more battery life.

"Another" audio subsytem? Today standard is PulseAudio on ALSA, and that it has been like that for at least 4 years. Before ALSA there was OSS but Linux developers disagree with how OSS do the sound mixing and resampling in kernel space (for better latency, they said) and OSS went closed source for awhile. PulseAudio is an effort to unite all the sound server/mixer (ESD from GNOME, aRTs from KDE or ALSA's own dmix) plus some nifty features like better battery life (less wake ups per second).
Update your FUD once in awhile, please.

It's a common FUD. Nowaday Linux audio works just fine, PulseAudio as a sound server (mixer) and ALSA to talk to the hardware, the rest (OpenAL, gstreamer, OSS, ESD) are either obsolete or totally different stuff unessential to audio playback. Earlier problems related to closed source softwares (Flash, Skype) or badly written HW drivers are mostly fixed.

A G+ acc is required to use that 'sharing' feature, and it will post the story on your G+ page. I did not realise that Google Reader community was that big. Back then the Recommended section had many interesting stories, now it is plagued with life hacker posts. I started to hate google after that.

The base install is limited, they did a great job auditing the code. But the moment you install something from the port, if that software contains bug, then OpenBSD is no more secure than Linux running that software. Or even worse, as OpenBSD refuses to have some kind of MAC implemented, Linux has SELinux/AppArmor/Tomoyo while FreeBSD has TrustedBSD. While those aren't silver bullet to every problem, they help in limiting the damage caused when your potential unsecure software gets compromised.

OOXML standard is a few dozen megabytes, and that is without the scripting part. While OpenDocument standard is a 7,4 Mb zip file. It isn't suprising that LO couldn't support OOXML properly.

You can use the Backport repo of Debian, they have a fairly new version of kernel and some other software there. Though the last time I tried it fried my system (I was using nvidia binary blob back then)

Gentoo, duh. I could still roll my own kernel in Fedora to apply some patches that haven't been accepted in the main tree yet, just fix the rpm sources, add new patch, rpmbuild and yum localinstall :)

Mostly it is related to bad behaved hardware or incompleted driver. In my case enable rc6 power saving on sandy bridge boost my battery capacity from 3,5 to 6 hours on linux (it is around 4,5 to 5 hours on windows), turn off or reduce wifi tx power helps too. So check your laptop hardware, there might be some that haven't had power management yet.

I'm not a native German speaker, just someone who is learning the language. In that sentence, 'Morgen' (morning) already implies will happen in the future, so the 'werden' (as 'will' in this case) is not needed. Without it, the sentence will be "Es wird bald regnen", or "I will rain soon".
(I have been studying only for 2 years, so take what I said with a grain of salt).