.NET as a language isn't that bad because it's not a language. It's a frikkin framework.

You think it's worth getting your self permanently IDed just so that a bunch of soldiers could identify each other in combat? Wouldn't that application demand ONLY the soldiers to be chipped?

Also, you really need to give your privacy away with shit like that?

Maybe you have misunderstood me.

The "connections" are a part of their business strategy. That's what they earn their revenues from: knowing who is interacting with whom, for what etc. So in a way, it is a very selfish (or mutual) thing to do.

Contributions to projects is very selfless, because Facebook is not making direct profits from making the source available (they might be making money from the changes they make, but not from making the code usable to others)

Agreed. But who does? Most of the technologies are not cared for even though they affect lives in large ways (MapReduce works everywhere from Google search queries, to Twitter, and Facebook. I don't know many people outside /. or IRC channels who'd even know about MapReduce)

According to me, the bigger picture here, is the obvious picture. The details seem more interesting to me. Doesn't sound like Asperger's to me. Sounds like I am just too inquisitive. ;)

You make a valid point, but this quoted part is pure bullshit.

The actual good Facebook has done is by contributing to projects like Cassandra and a bunch of work it did on MapReduce and Hadoop, memcached and what not. Visit their github.com to check on that, though those aren't the only projects they worked on (more like, those are the projects they have started)

KDE dependencies.

I don't understand why this isn't modded up.

I prefer Xfce to LXDE, but basically 'installing a lightweight DE' (or a WM? Even better!) is what you should do.

It's not a text editor. It's an operating system that happens to have text editing functionalities.

This guy could very well be a Microsoft minion. But you do realize this is Slashdot, right?

People don't always read the article *and then* comment. Don't expect that argument to be valid for every post :P

I know what you mean. If I were a .NET dev, there'd be no reason for me to look anywhere outside Visual Studio.

And wait. Feature X? There's a script that does just that. Now it's just a matter of time (a lot of it) you install it, and learn how to use it. :-)