It's been an open secret for years now that the branches of the federal government tend to "bury" their budget inside of other allocations to hide them from outsiders, supposedly explaining the existence of $500 hammers and $1,000 toilets. Is the NSA also doing this, but with bandwidth rather than dollars? It might explain how suddenly the various ISPs are up in arms about bandwidth hogs and how a small percent are using up the majority of the bandwidth available on the network....

Because none of that other UI desktop stuff exists on the Ubuntu repos. Nope, not at all. You're not allowed to install them even if they do.

You mean like Gnome 2.xx? Go ahead and try, see how far you get. Even trying to install the MATE fork results in a multitude of breakage all over the system, because of dependencies related to the increasingly ironic "Unity" desktop.

I've been looking for a replacement to Ubuntu for a while now and have begun moving on to Debian as a result with frequent stops here and there to try out other distros to see if any come close to working as well for me as earlier versions of Ubuntu did. So far the only one which does is Debian and even then there's all sorts of stuff that I have to relearn while missing the way Ubuntu used to handle it...

So yeah, 'forced' is an apt description. I (and many others) have been forced to make a decision between keeping our Gnome 2.xx desktop and Ubuntu. Sadly unlike those who still cling to Windows XP those of us who use Linux are unable to simply use the older versions because of how quickly bitrot sets in and how difficult it becomes to install applications.

Sort of the "I-won't-ever-retire" cop that's only a shadow of his former glory.

You mean, The Last Action Hero?

/me ducks

Apple should offer legacy support back to Classic, at least, with full 68K/PPC support - there's a tremendous amount of excellent software that was never brought to OSX

Basilisk II does a really great job of supporting Classic MacOS 68k from MacOS 0.x to MacOS 8.1 and Sheepshaver is capable of supporting PPC MacOS 7.5.2 thru 9.0.4. If you want, there's even the vMac project and its more portable and actively developed spin off Mini vMac which allow you to emulate the old Apple Macintosh Plus...

What exactly is it you think is missing?

MATE has been upgrade to 1.6, which saw many old and deprecated packages replaced with newer technologies

oh no! things were removed! Better fork MATE so I can have it be exactly the same as a previous version!

I know you're just being snarky, but really why is it so hard to keep my desktop the same while still getting security updates for the over all system and new versions of my apps when they upgrade? Why?

I hate to give Microsoft credit for anything, but at least they had enough insight to keep the option to switch back to the previous version of the desktop available for many many releases afterwards. Up until fairly recently it was pretty easy to go back to your preferred work space in Windows. From Win95--Windows 2000 you could still get Progman.exe to run. You could still revert the taskbar and themes from Fisherprice to the 'standard' look that carried over from Win95 all the way through Windows XP to Windows 7.

Why is it so unreasonable to expect the same in Linux?

Oh and I'm one of those people who prefer MATE over the mess that Gnome 3.0 has become with its intentional breaking of the system to prevent people from keeping what they had before, but if these changes actually ruin the desktop you can be sure that people will indeed fork MATE.

Looks like the anti-MS shills are spamming Slashdot's comment section again.

Who needs shills when your competition has been diligently chumming the water in which they live for a decade or two? Microsoft has earned its hatred in this industry, one pissed off user at a time. To pretend this entirely predictable reaction is the work of shills only betrays your own allegiance and paid for status...

With Orson Scott Card's emphatically homophobic world view, I refuse to help finance any of his works.

Awesome. It's certainly your right to choose to not read any of the man's books or watch any media based on them. You're absolutely free to do without the enjoyment that comes from reading one of his books or watching this movie which from the trailer looks to be quite fun.

What you're not free to do is get in the faces of those of us who are planning to continue enjoying his work and seek to ruin it for us.

You all remember OUYA, don't you? The 'Android console' destined to be a failure because Microsoft and SONY were going to crush them completely...remember?
Only now SONY and Microsoft have begun having a contest to see which one of them can completely tank their console sales the best and Microsoft just took a major lead in the competition... Not that I can really blame SONY as they're still smarting over how badly they got spanked when they removed OtherOS from the PS3.
Meanwhile with this latest salvo, Microsoft announcing a requirement for always on internet connectivity just to play the game, it looks like those triple A titles the fanboys were moaning about not being available on OUYA is a good thing. Instead of Planned Obsolesce games, the OUYA will offer games that will work darn near forever--and emulators will be available so you can still play all those old games you fell in love with gaming for in the first place!
Makes a nice HTPC with XBMC too I hear....what's not to love?

It is estimated that 5-10% of the population is gay.

Errr...actually it's less. A lot less. As a matter of fact would you believe the real number stands at slightly less than 2%?

Don't worry, almost no one in America gets this one right...

The difference between your Martin Niemoller reference and what I am saying is that what they are going after, is that in Niemoller's case, the people "they came for" may have, at worst, been considered the fringes of society, but they weren't necessarily doing anything that was previously against the law. Copyright infringement actually *IS* illegal, and has been for quite a long time.

I'll take copyright infringement seriously the day that Big Media starts taking the public domain seriously, and not one second before. They thought they could play this game of indefinitely extending the length of copyright terms, effectively stealing from the public domain and all of humanity without there being unforeseen consequences? Guess what? People now take copyrights about as seriously as Big Media does, i.e. not at all.

Fuck your copyrights.