I was just about to type something along the lines of what you did, but since you already did, it seems I can save myself the typing.

The way I see it: Desktop keyboards, Dvorak or Colemak; cell phones and tablet computers, MessagEase. Use the right tool for the job, and ironically, QWERTY is never the right tool (and this is especially true on a touchscreen "keyboard").

No... the real solution is, quit fucking putting such high-tech god damn road signs on the highways. Since when the fuck did the traditional pure metal signs go out of style? The roadsides don't need such expensive hackable junk. In fact, if they're electronic, programmable and have giant screens of some sort, I'd have a hard time even calling them "signs" in the first place. Just go back to the basics. How hard is it to figure out?

What's there to learn? That the U.S. government has grown out of control into a corrupt state of bullshit, lies and deceit, where not even the basic guarantees of its own Constitution and human rights of its citizens are upheld? Where you are automatically a criminal until proven innocent (assuming you're even granted a "speedy and fair trial" to pull that one off in the first place)?

The only thing to learn here is just what the extent of this country's corruption is. And that is the only thing I've consistently noticed: that it only goes one way... and that is, it only gets worse.

I started with Windows, played around with KDE3 a bit in my early days of Linux, settled on Xfce and GNOME 2 as my preferred environments and once GNOME 3 happened and KDE 4 stopped sucking as bad, I used it for a little while. I've also briefly used OpenBox, in the form of CrunchBang and LXDE.

Eventually, it became clear that I was going to be getting a laptop at some point, so I decided to learn about tiling window managers and try several of them out. Having to use a touchpad or drag out a mouse every time I wanted to get on my laptop didn't exactly sound exciting (or acceptable) to me. Out of a long list I tried out, some of the most memorable and my favorites included dwm, xmonad, spectrwm/scrotwm (boo to the developers for the name change... pussies!), notion, and i3. A few others a had some fun with were euclid-wm and herbstluftwm.

In the end, I have decided to settle on i3, and that is what I am using now. I love it--I have been using it since before I even got my laptop, and it's still my primary choice (even as a desktop window manager). Avoiding the mouse by using tiling window managers has improved my wrist... fewer aches and other odd feelings. Well worth the learning experience and effort to switch. As an added bonus, I get much, much better use of my screen, with next to no effort on my part, and absolutely no overlapping windows.

Two words: Alternative Firmware.

Beats the hell out of the stock junk that companies put on their hardware.

I think you're somehow blaming hardware companies' incompetence with software on Linux itself, which makes no fucking sense whatsoever.

Depends on how you look at it, but last I checked the NT kernel had the absolute largest number of users on home and business desktops compared to any other operating system kernel out there...

Of course, if you add routers, phones and numerous other specialized systems into the mix, then Linux spanks the shit out of it.

Any halfway-decent program will put an asterisk, brackets or some other character(s) in the window's title to let you distinguish between a file that is identical to the copy saved on disk and a file that has been modified since last saving. If your program doesn't even append something as simple as "(modified)" to the title of the window containing your file, then your program sucks and it'd probably be a good idea to switch to something that at least supports such a basic feature.

Oh, great. Next thing you know, you'll be paying extra for absolutely worthless components added to appliances, just so it can sell you more junk. You'll end up buying a refrigerator with built-in temperature and humidity sensors. Why? Just so your fridge can tell you you need to buy a humidifier every winter, and try to get you to buy a central air conditioner every summer day you walk into the kitchen. Temp sensor go bad? Oh, don't worry--if you don't fix it, it'll just bug you that you need to get a new furnace every winter day until you get it fixed.

Google, fuck you. And no thanks, you keep your ads away from my fucking appliances.

That brings me back to the second sentence in my post.

Did you even read the post at all? Obviously, you are talking about administering a system. But I can guarantee that I am not administering a system while I sit here wasting time posting crap on Slashdot, and I have this funny feeling you're not either.

Have fun watching YouTube in Lynx.

I personally make a distinction between "using" and "administering" a machine, and as a user, I tend to run X11 (these days often with a tiling window manager). When I want to perform some administrative tasks, I'll often just run a terminal emulator within that environment. Face it, while great for many things, the command line--especially in its raw, no-X11 form, is pretty limited in many areas from the point of view of a typical user.

Don't get me wrong though; I'll often use wget instead of Firefox to download files, do basic file system operations in a terminal, even play an occasional podcast in mplayer. But really, it is not optimal to use the CLI 100% for everyday use for semi-normal people.

"One choice is to do without."

And *that* is exactly the choice I made. I refuse to pay a monthly bill for a garbage service that acts as a medium for ad delivery more than anything. And an overpriced service at that. Not to mention the shitty programming, I'd rather watch paint dry (and as a bonus, that would be a much cheaper form of entertainment).

I think that's your problem right now. If you're sitting there getting increasingly screwed by AT&T over the cost of their telephone service since around 1997, then why the hell are you still with them? What are you waiting for, the two-decade mark?

Then again, the same could be said of cable TV subscribers. They've been getting reamed for decades, they know they're getting fucked, but they keep bending over more and more every time the company raises their already ridiculous rates. I never even hear many complaints anymore, people are just so damn used to the prices going up. But they never tell the cable companies to go fuck themselves and take their business elsewhere, to an entertainment provider that has more fair pricing and service. So the cycle continues... indefinitely.

Doubt it. It's more likely that they believe in a "let's make something that does every fucking thing you can imagine, but do none of it well" in a similar way as Sony, which they've proven with the Xbox 360, and especially made obvious with its dashboard replacement. That device? The cell phone, with their own OS on it. They didn't buy Nokia for nothing...

By... removing it? That's an improvement? If it's poor code, why not just, you know... rewrite or improve it, instead of gutting it completely? Oh yeah, because only the clueless matter to Mozilla anymore.

Meanwhile, I despise the lack of the ability to use small icons any more. It allowed me to see more of the page, since the beginning of Firefox's existance. And now, Mozilla seems to feel the need that smaller icons and many other customization features are unnecessary, and as a result I can't fucking do shit with this atrocious release. Just when you think Firefox can't possibly get any worse, that Mozilla's mastered the art of turning their browser to shit, they impress yet again with feature removal after feature removal, all while still saying, "go find an add-on!" Seriously, there needs to be a Mozilla equivalent to RTFM; how about go "FAFE" (Find A Fucking Extension)?