If the alternative isn't GNOME or XFce but instead "just" a window manager, then KDE is indeed far more resource-intensive than the alternatives.

Compare your stripped-down KDE with fvwm2, e16 or twm. Go ahead and leave out your launcher, desktop and everything: compare *just* kwin. It's far, far heavier.

When you need "Just a WM" it's better to avoid the DE-focused WMs.

This is why I *do* torrent. I'm perfectly happy to buy when someone will sell me what I want, but when they won't *I'm going to get it anyway*, let the anti-consumer business beware. If what I want is a video I own and can watch whenever and wherever, and keep in my personal archive, then I'm going to get it no matter what laws they buy or technical restrictions they try to enforce. There's nothing immoral about having it your way and I'm going to continue to vote with my economic feet by not buying from those who won't sell me what I want. They can adapt and profit or go out of business, it's all the same to me.

Just because it will never happen doesn't mean it wouldn't be good for society.

I was going to say this, too. Dorkness Rising captures the feel and some of the fun of playing D&D in an easy to consume 1.5 hour movie format. Some things are easier understood by experiencing them instead of having them merely explained, but in case you can't convince someone to play cold you can give them this vicarious experience.

If you haven't seen this movie and you read slashdot, you need to.

A tip of the hat to you, sir, for the only genuinely funny comment posted to this story thus-far.

Sure I can. It's an engineering problem they opted to solve in the worst possible way: Not solve it at all. I blame people for being lazy.

While I agree with your sentiment your poor grasp of the facts harms the argument you are making by making you appear to be an ignorant fool.

Debian has not "Handled updated and major upgrades flawlessly for decades," Debian has only handled this for *years*. Debian has not yet reached its 20th anniversary, and apt did not exist at its founding (much less in a flawless form).

You cannot have a host that started on potato in the mid 1990s because potato was released in 2000. The only "Mid '90s" Debian releases were Buzz and Rexx. I don't consider the release of Bo in 1997 to be "mid" enough, I count it as "late" 90s.

Nevertheless, I have personally experienced what you experience: A system installed as potato that is still running today using the current stable. Debian's package system, package manager, policy and culture contribute to a high quality system where updates work smoothly and do not require reboots.

That whooshing sound is the point passing far above your head. Look up! Maybe you can still get a glimpse of it.

Oh yes, plus one million insightfuls to you, sir.

I quit a job over this kind of thing. What it comes down to is that they either hired you for your expertise and respect it or they don't, and if they don't someone else will. No matter where I go I'm constantly fighting the what/how battle: You tell me what, I decide how. Mostly there is no problem with this if I begin with a non-confrontational explanation of why it has to be that way.

You could say the same thing about GNOME3. UX wonks should be kept out of the final UI decision, period. They know how to be wonky but are too narrowly focused to be trusted.

The idea is sound, the implementation is lousy.

Since when is the "right to be held accountable" a "right"? This is a clear attack on anonymity, as is the glaring omission of a right to anonymity from the list of bullet points!

I fail to see how most of the things listed have anything to do with the internet. Equality, Association and Privacy are rights we have anyway, so they should already apply to the internet as with everywhere else.

I like that he's got "Sharing" in there and I think I understand why, but we already have freedom of speech and I don't see how this is any more than that.

The bullet on Property is worrying at best. We already have a right to property, are we now trying to codify additional rights for the ill conceived notion of "Intellectual Property"? Is this supposed to imply DRM requirements as a matter of law for all digital "property"? I don't see that this can lead anywhere good.

So yeah, nice idea but horrible details which are either due to innocent misunderstanding or a veiled ulterior motive. Given the source, I'm guessing that the language here is something that some unknown corporate masters thought would be good for them and not something people who know anything about the internet told him would be a good idea.

olvwm is not just "quite old," it has a UI that only a mother could love... twm is far nicer.

I am an E16 guy.

I've tried all WMs and DEs under the sun. I've been trying them all for quite a while, since GNOME 1.2 days for sure (some before that, back when the choices were more like "fvwm or afterstep?" but quite consistently since GNOME 1.2)

KDE4, in my experience, on my hardware, is crashy. I've tried running it "just to see" and found that my *entire system* locks up to the point where even a remote ssh+kill of X won't recover it. Even when it doesn't lock completely I see occasional inexplicable crashes.

KDE4 is resource-hungry. Nevermind RAM usage, which is not great, I find that it spins up my CPU and leaves it there. I routinely note high CPU usage from KDE applications and background services. Nepomuk-related things are certainly not good in this area. Often I cannot make the CPU hogging go away without logging out of KDE (and sometimes not even then!)

KDE4 isn't configurable enough. I know GNOME people are boggling at this, but I like to configure my workflow "just so," and KDE doesn't fully allow this. GNOME 2.x was worse, GNOME 3.x is far worse, and Unity... nowhere close. I say this to be fair, but if KDE4 doesn't let me make it work "my way" (and it doesn't) then it's not much good. Example: It only supports multiple desktops, no virtual desktops. This is bad, because I only like virtual desktops. I can't configure which mouse button switches desktops vs. drags windows on the pager. I can't, or can't figure out, how to reduce the panel down to just the pager. I could go on, there are a lot of little details.

KDE4 doesn't do keybindings. KDE3 had some kind of solution for this, but KDE4 is a mess. The only real option is bbkeys, which works but is a stupid kind of a solution. Technically this is a "not configurable enough" problem, but it's so huge that it deserves its own bullet point.

I want to like KDE. I promote it to less adventurous users! But, when my system doesn't work how I need it to work, doesn't have a way to control keyboard shortcuts, keeps my CPU humming at 100%, eats my RAM, grinds my disks, crashes my apps and hangs my computer... it's kind of a non-starter.

I use E16. I've been following the development of E17, which is cool-looking, but until it's "done" I don't really see the incentive to switch.

E16 is stable. In the last 10 years I have seen exactly THREE bugs in E16, one of which is arguable, one of which requires $HOME to be out of disk space, and the other of which is not a showstopper. Crashes? What's a crash? My WM *never* goes down, and I am one of those insane people who has X uptime measured in months, not days or hours. Current score: 9 months. E16 is still running, not leaking memory, not eating CPU... it Just Works. I just can't justify switching to any environment unless it can approach this level of stability.

E16 is lightweight. That's kind of ironic for a WM which was known for "pretty but resource-intensive" in its infancy, but what was resource-hungry in 1998 isn't so bad any more. By being just a WM and some applets, all of which are optional and easy to disable, the complexity is low and the footprint is tiny. Even with all of the "cool" effects enabled the CPU and RAM cost is miniscule (and I don't enable them, because I prefer functional to flashy.)

E16 is somewhat configurable. Okay, so the theme you pick matters a lot (bluesteel here, for about 10 years now) but the *behavior* of the WM is all configurable from user-discoverable GUI settings panels. It's not as crazily flexible as, say, sawfish, but it has more than enough for me. Moving windows should show outlines of the new position (with guide lines to the edge of the screen!) and exact pixel dimensions and coords in the corner. Do you care whether iconified windows are shown in the alt+tab list? I don't want them, but if you do you can have them. I like to have 4x16 virtual desktops, but the option is right there if you prefer 4x4 multiple and 4x4 virtual.

E16 has e16keyedit, a crude but effective Enlightenment keybinding management tool. between this and eesh you can control pretty much anything you want from the keyboard.

I could describe the virtues of E16 for many more paragraphs (I find, for example, that E16 is one of the few modern WMs which makes using GIMP painless), but I won't. It's simply the right thing for me and, even if it weren't, I'm used to it. Improve KDE all you like but I won't use it until it gives me something I need that E16 doesn't; chances are E17 will get there first, though, so don't expect me to be switching any time soon.

KDE 5.0 won't be screwed up like this, as you put it, it will be more like the 2.0->3.0 transition, which was a more or less straight upgrade.

If you want to worry, worry about 6.0. But, be aware that this won't happen for 5+ years.

A desktop Linux client is probably not going to happen until dm-verity gets in to mainline.

See this post, and then the LWN writeup for details.