Skud's an experienced programmer. As is the case with many experienced computer programmers, she didn't have a computer science degree. Please see any of the countless debates on Slashdot on whether computer science degrees are necessary for programming. She wasn't switching to a technical position: she was getting forced out of a technical position she had held for three years. She wasn't switching to a handle; her name is Skud, that is the name she normally uses, and that is what Google's official policy supposedly defines as the name to use for a Google account.

Much of the article is a critique of Silicon Valley culture in general, and why she's glad she left.

I keep my Fedora VM regularly updated from the stable repository.

$ uname -a
Linux fedora.vm 3.6.2-4.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Oct 17 02:43:21 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

So yes, at least one major Linux distribution is using the 3.6 kernel.

The best candidates spend time in prison.

It's Facebook. What else are they going to say? "We're terribly sorry, but our business model depends upon selling third parties your personal information, so we have no intention of actually respecting anyone's privacy, and our privacy settings are fraudulent"?

The best quote from a game full of good writing.

There can be no democracy if institutions act in secret.

1. In most cases, with a typical desktop, you can boot a Linux distro and get to a GUI with no trouble at all. This has been true for years. Try a LiveCD some time.
2. In some cases, you'll run into problems, and need to fix things on the command line, but that's true with Windows as well.
3. There is much better documentation for fixing Linux problems than there is for fixing Windows problems.

Bankers are overpowered.

Admittedly, I'd actually given up on Ubuntu, not because of Unity exactly, but because of how Canonical was making it clear they had no interest whatsoever in what the community thought.

However, I wasn't talking about Fedora and Ubuntu completely shutting down their UI projects. I wouldn't want them to; I rather like Gnome Shell. I had in mind more simply that if a whole lot of users switch to LXDE, then that would send signals that would lead to improvements in LXDE.

And you must admit, it's much easier for a Linux desktop distribution user to switch desktop environments, then it is for a Windows user to switch to Linux or OS X.

There are, after all, several full-fledged desktop environments available for Fedora and Ubuntu and all their kin. If fewer people are using Gnome Shell and more are using LXDE, there will be a shift in feature requests and bug reports and new applets developed, and resources will shift around.

Or, "Have you ever seen one?"

One of his lessons learned is that "everyone is replaceable", which is the sort of things action movie villains say when they're pointing a gun at the hero's head.

I'm getting annoyed with video tutorials.

More and more often, when I search for documentation, I get links to videos, mostly YouTube videos. At best, these are inefficient; if you really need to explain details of the GUI, you should be able to do it with a few screenshots, but videos involve someone who is almost certainly not a professional voice actor reading technical information aloud, in a format that is difficult to review or index, and doesn't allow for copy-and-paste of URLs or command lines.

It's worse in my job, where for some reason, instead of actually writing out documentation, we get training videos recorded by project managers in which they talk over a Powerpoint presentation. At least there's the Powerpoint to refer to, but any additional explanations by the managers are difficult to hear, and again, difficult to review or index.

Really, what's so appealing about recording a video, instead of just writing out an explanation?

Oh, so horribly true. Especially when those three articles are incomplete, inaccurate, or years out of date.

This surprised me. I had no idea this resource existed, and that is a bad way to distribute UI extensions, even if it was well-publicized.