Also, look out for the audio codecs. Some dont work well with older kernels and ALSA. I have a Gigabyte F2A85X-D3H mobo with A8-5500 APU and i run Debian Testing on it. The stock 3.2 kernel gives an oops at startup and i have no sound. The 3.6 kernel however works just fine. And check the video drivers availability and stability if the board/CPU/APU has built in graphics. For example. Intel has the "best" open source driver support in theory. In practice, for the moment the latest Intel video card drivers are not good (the good stuff is in the latest dev versions and takes quite a bit of time until they trickle down in the stable kernels used by distributions).

I use XFCE 4.10 + lightdm now (i used it in the past along with gnome 2). It is very good and has pretty much everything you need including network mounts. Its more stable than Gnome 2 ever was plus its not that heavy on dependencies and desktop services. Its also noticeably faster (on nvidia cards with the proprietary driver with core2duo/Athlon II level CPUs) than Gnome even on basic window drawing. Granted it doesnt have the Gnome's OOtB bazillion of services and integration, but i regard this as a plus. I did try Gnome 3 and Unity and wasnt pleased at all - Unity seems to be ok for touchscreens, but Gnome 3 doesnt seem to be - both are crap for desktop usage, either you have to learn entirely new skills for basic stuff, either you accomplish a previously-point-and-click operation with multiple maneuvers. Well done Gnome devs - you have accomplished the task of neuthering your own DE with unprecedented effectiveness - it was THE de-facto Linux DE, you probably thought you could pull a Microsoft/Vista/8 and still have the backing of most users? Well, seems didnt work like that not in this world (Linux/Open Source, that is). Would have been that hard to make changes gradually or do a fork, as previously mentioned? Or just tweak the hell out of Gnome 2 with the many hours of work that went into this crapfest...

"Users were entirely dependent upon Dell to pay PowerVR to constantly update the driver for new Kernel releases, which they did not." Well, that isnt Dell's fault, is it? Being Dell a big company like nvidia? PS. AFAIK that the ABI's that break are in fact the x server's, not the kernels.

I was under the impression that counting browser share is done by taking a sites visitors and identifying the ACTUAL number of users of each browser. But then i read that page hits are counted and hidden tabs are skewing results. Ok , so i use browser X and i have tons of tabs open, HIDDEN OR NOT, does that mean that i somewhat contribute to artificial inflation of my browsers share? Because as i understand it browser share should indicate the usage of a browser by actual people and NOT the amount of VISIBLE tabs opened by them. By this metric, people like my wife are essentially skewing the results (she has the habit of opening 50 or more tabs)? Additionally netstat uses weighting that takes this whole counting thing into a more "controllable" area - just downgrade country x, upgrade country y and voila you have a few percent +/- (well not that simple, but anyway). I am no expert in statistics but i know that when different stuff are factored in, the greater the chance of adjusting the results. Personally i see that fewer people use IE - mostly company execs/workers who are under the impression that it is actually good because its made by Microsoft or because the computer came with it and they dont "have the time" to "learn to use" something safer and faster - most users actually use Firefox or Chrome.

Actually i think gnome/nautilus has a right-click option for that or something similar. Also, no root access required if you use fuseiso. This fuseiso thingie can be used with thunar too (ex. "fuseiso -p %n ./contents-of-%n" as a custom right click option).