I couldn't care less that systemd exists. If you don't like something, don't use it. I use it on a laptop for the fast boot time, and it works fairly well there, but there's enough legitimate complaints about systemd that we need alternatives.

The problem is that other things are starting to depend on systemd. GNOME being the worst offender. Not that I use it, but who knows what DE could depend on systemd next. It's like being told that if you use bash, you must use emacs.

But no amount of technical knowledge or intelligence will matter if the people in question are biased to begin with.

Besides, at this point, the discussion isn't even "should we use systemd?", it's "should we force all of our users to use systemd?" Whether or not you use systemd (disclaimer: I use it on my laptop and a desktop, but use sysvinit on servers), it's pretty hard to deny that there are plenty of perfectly legitimate complaints against systemd, to the point where forcing systemd instead of allowing people to choose their own init system is clearly not a great idea.

No, they'll probably just find a way to ruin blackberries too.

I mean, all they had to do to get guaranteed business was just keep thinkpads the same. Instead, we get chiclet keyboards and trackpoint buttons integrated in the touchpad for whatever reason. I like the build quality (my current one has been spilled on and burnt), but I'll probably just have to buy some dell or whatever with a trackpoint.

I can live with the post-IBM drop in quality, but nowadays they've removed almost everything that makes a thinkpad a thinkpad.

Also when they post crappy Dice articles and have to figure out how to get people to click.

What I've noticed is that the presence of payment opportunities very rarely actually improves the quality of things being made, but rather people just start charging for things that they wouldn't have before. Case in point: iPhone apps. Back in the 1.x days, before there was an app store, people made their free homebrew apps. App store comes out, and I see that several publishers pulled their free apps and put them in the app store for a price. You can still see it even from an absolute standpoint. Look at browsers. Tons of free browsers for desktops, which are actual complete browsers. On the iPhone? People want you to pay for literal Safari reskins. They didn't even write a rendering engine or much of anything, they basically just made baby's first iPhone app. And they want you to pay money for it.

Just imagine if you had to pay 99c for every package you install on a linux distribution.

As for movies/music, it becomes more of an ideals issue. I don't want to support RIAA/MPAA scumbags or anyone associated with them. I know that if I buy music from a big label, the people who actually made that music will only see somewhere between 0 and 10% of that money. Hell, for a typical album, it would be more efficient to mail the artist a dollar and pirate it than buy their album legitimately.

I've seen way too many bus and taxi drivers being rude drivers (blocking intersections mainly). They can't even feign ignorance when they drive for a living.

"Windows X"
Try pronouncing that out loud and you can probably figure out why they didn't spring for that name.

Same, so I switched to XFCE. I'd much rather just have a nice minimal DE that doesn't get in the way. I'm not using a DE for the sake of using a DE, I'm using it to facilitate using actual applications.

The exact reasons for their loss of marketshare doesn't change the fact that trying to copy another browser and doing it rather poorly isn't going to get them anywhere soon.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with a UI "stagnating". A *nix shell is one of the most powerful user interfaces, and yet it's been mostly unchanged for ages.

You only need change in a UI if there was something wrong with it to begin with. When people want change for the sake of change, you get abominations like Metro and Gnome 3. Tell me, what's the actual goal of Mozilla's UI changes? Is there some clear UX goal here? Does it take less clicks to do the same task? Is it more intuitive for new users? I don't see how cramming everything into one menu achieves any of that, nor do I see how making it look and feel different than every other GUI program on the user's PC makes it more intuitive.

Fixing bugs doesn't require a total redesign (especially not one that blatantly copies another browser that they just so happened to be losing a ton of marketshare to).

As for your screenshots, once you look past the fact that the UI elements are themed differently (ironically, I used to dislike Chrome because it didn't follow the OS's theme closely whereas Firefox did, but now it's the other way around), you see they both have essentially the same layout. Titlebar/pseudo-titlebar on top, tabs next, then the third layer has navigation buttons, an address/search bar (split into 2 in firefox, although mostly unecessary since the address bar can also search), then a bookmark button, and finally a thing that replaces the menubar (which chrome does better). Then it's the page, and at the bottom each browser does not have a status bar, but rather just shows you the URL of a hovered link in a box that pops up when necessary.

Now compare that to an older Firefox, which has: Full title bar on top, real menu bar (which, in older versions was just a normal UI element, in other words you could move it and put other stuff on the same toolbar. Useful for small screens since you could put bookmarks beside it), then navigation toolbar, with a URL bar that wouldn't hide stuff from the user by default, and the search bar. Then it was a tab bar, the page content, and a normal status bar. I think it's perfectly safe to say that Firefox looks more like Chrome than previous versions of Firefox.

Seriously, it can't be that hard to just have a flexible UI where I can put the stuff where I want, and choose what toolbars to show/hide. I know that it's not hard, because they did exactly that years ago. Someone wants the status bar gone? Great, they can disable it. Someone wants tabs on top? I'm sure there's an addon for that.

That's a great point. Now answer this: why should the burden of installing addons which change the browser's look/feel/behavior fall on the people who don't want it to change? If someone wants a different UI, they can install addons to change it to how they want. I'd rather the mozilla devs just do their job: make a basic browser where people can add what features they want and customize the UI to their liking. Fix bugs, reduce memory usage, keep up with web standards.

I remember when they first announced they were going to put tabs on top. There was a decent amount of debate about it. Guess what controversy means? It means you should make it an option. There's obviously enough people on each side such that it should be an option (which, admittedly, they did. For a while, and then they killed it).

Besides, the original point still stands: why try to be a poor imitation of Chrome? Where did Mozilla's innovation go?

Since when does change imply progress? I guess MS made great progress with Metro. What about Microsoft Bob? Was that progress?

Turns out people have these things called "opinions". People who have the opinion that Chrome's UI style is better can use Chrome. People who prefer Firefox's old UI now have nowhere to turn other than Firefox with a bunch of addons and config tweaks to try to get it as close as possible as it used to be.

But really, the only thing we have to look at here is Firefox's plummetting marketshare. Chrome does a great job of being Chrome, while Firefox does an awful job of being Firefox.

What "false equivalencies"? When I look at firefox 31 and chromium 35 side-by-side with a fresh profile, the only major difference in UI is that Firefox doesn't combine URL and search bars. The other differences are trivial, namely:
1. Firefox puts some buttons on different places on the toolbar
2. Firefox doesn't follow my GTK theme for buttons
And yes, I'd rather Firefox catered to Firefox users. What's so wrong with that? Right now they're trying to cater to Chrome users/potential Chrome users, which is idiotic because they're not going to sway anybody from using Chrome by making a poor imitation of it. In everything from the UI to version numbering, it's hard to deny that they're just trying to copy google.
They're not "fixing" their UI in the least bit, they're just driving users away from it as shown by their marketshare numbers.

Well, a few firefox changes I can name off the top of my head are:

• Tabs on top. Used to have an option to put tabs back on the bottom, but this seems to have been removed.
• Trying to replace as much menu functionality as possible with text-less buttons (at least they still give you the option to have menus, but other features are less fortunate).
• Status bar gone (although this one is old). There used to be a half-assed "addon bar" where you could put addons' buttons, but it wouldn't even bother to put the former status bar content back in there.
• Hiding parts of the URL.

Right now, I've got both browsers up, and the UIs are literally identical except for the exact layout of buttons on the toolbar. And the fact that firefox's default UI no longer seems to use your GTK theme, while chrome still does. Firefox is just trying to clone the chrome UI but does a poor job of it.