Do you think it might have something to do with the influence of money in US elections? ;)

I get the impression that you think iOS (or OSX for that matter) has more BSD inside than it actually has.

Every year or so, I get the urge to replace Xubuntu with Debian on my desktop and development systems. Sadly, it just doesn't make sense to do so. Ubuntu still has a few huge advantages over Debian. In particular:

Ubuntu's bug tracking system is far more convenient than Debian's, provides richer categorization and relation tools, and integrates with upstream trackers. I waste less time when I have to report problems, and since more people are sharing knowledge in launchpad, I also waste less time on diagnostics and fixes. Average users find it more approachable, too, and can often use it to find a workarounds for problems that they need solved before the next Debian release cycle crawls around.

Ubuntu's personal package archive system is both a public build farm and an open software repository. This means I can share custom software packages with others, with no bureaucratic overhead, on any release schedule I choose, through a channel that's extraordinarily easy for users to install, with integration into the standard system update process. Oh, and I don't have to set up build environments for multiple architectures (or in some cases, any build environment at all). Of course, all of this also benefits non-developers, by giving them access to a lot of software that isn't part of the Debian archive.

Last time I checked, Ubuntu still had far better support for certain important hardware components, like my graphics card. I'm an advanced user, so I could probably jump through the hoops to get proprietary drivers working in Debian, but most people don't have that kind of knowledge or the time/inclination to develop it. I wish there was a way around this by simply choosing different hardware, but there simply is no good substitute for certain proprietary devices. (Linux gamers can either use nVidia hardware with the closed driver, or be stuck with inferior performance.)

Despite Ubuntu making some dumb decisions and pissing me off at times, it honestly has done a lot to advance linux. I'd like to switch to Debian, but honestly, it would just make my life harder. I hope it catches up soon.

Obligatory link to the BadUSB project, including proof-of-concept:

https://srlabs.de/badusb/

Git's user interface is the biggest counterproductive, nonintuitive, inconsistent, needlessly complex, user-hostile, pile of garbage that I can remember ever haunting my terminal, and I say this after having worked with sendmail config files. Sadly, Linus' name and GitHub's early momentum have propelled this blight on the face of modern software development into entrenchment.

Meanwhile, Mercurial has all the same power with practically none of the pain.

When I wondered how a tool as important as Git could go for so long with such glaring (but fixable) flaws, I found archived messages from Git maintainers who were not only too stubborn to learn from other projects, but also such obstructionists that they actually discouraged improvements. Nobody wants to donate their time in an environment like that. So much for, "it's open source; contribute a fix yourself." How very sad.

Apparently, plan to release a linux port after they fix some things.
Reference:
https://steamcommunity.com/app...

To expand on that, there are cases when a root exploit is preferable to a bootloader unlock. For example, when the official bootloader unlock procedure deletes all your applications and data, and permanently disables some of the features in your phone. (I'm looking at you, Sony.)

That bothers me too, but I'm starting to think that manufacturers are deliberately avoiding a read-only failure mode for security reasons: if your drive enters a permanent read-only state, how do you erase it before recycling? I imagine having used crypto from day 0 would be your only safeguard at that point, but even good crypto gets broken eventually, so how do you safeguard the data on that read-only drive in the long term? Is physical destruction the only answer?

On the other hand, maybe the total-failure mode that current SSDs enter is just a false sense of security. It's possible that the data on those chips is still available to someone who can bypass the controller. I don't have an easy way to check.

Thank goodness. It's embarrassing how long my desktop machines have had the habit of looking completely locked up whenever they're asked to copy a large file in the background. It's especially bad when a slow-ish NAS server is involved. I've tried the existing optional IO schedulers, and they don't fix the problem.

I self-host and encrypt where possible. For other things, I use providers as trustworthy as I can find.

Email privacy is a tough problem, but a solvable one. I'm working on a project that will give me gmail-like convenience without entrusting my data to Google, and might eventually grow automated/transparent encryption capabilities. It's going to be a while before it's usable, though; nobody is paying me to work on it, so it doesn't get enough of my time. (The mailpile project overlaps some of my goals in this area, and might be worth a look to anyone interested in the topic.)

A Facebook replacement is another tough one, perhaps even tougher than email, but I believe it's also solvable.

Please keep asking questions like this, and sharing what you discover. The more of us we have thinking about these problems, the more likely we are to work out their solutions.

Have you tried AquaMail? I haven't used it on a tablet, but it's pretty nice on a phone.

I'm think you must mean Geany. It's one of the best lightweight programmer's editors I've ever used.

Does Audacious do what you need? That's what I used to replace foobar2000 when I dumped Windows.

You had me until you said you plan to use Google+. Bye bye.

As an adult, I don't know that I'd exactly call this a hardware hack, but teenage me definitely thought it was unusual. :P