That's why http://www.worldreader.org/ delivers hardened (they replace the shell with rubber), solar-powered eink Kindles. A single day out in the Sun (where the kids spend a lot of their school day, anyway) and it is good for 30+ days. The kids are trained for 2 weeks (with a "pet egg") on how to properly care for / handle fragile equipment before they are loaned the kindles during school hours. Each kindle comes stocked with over 1,000 educational books. The literacy rate *shoots up* in every area they deliver them, mostly in Central and East Africa. They have a *very* small operational budget, so anything you give them goes a *long* way (compared to most charities).

They're doing much more amazing stuff over at www.worldreader.org! Delivering thousands of hardened, solar-powered Kindle eInk devices filled with 1,000s of books for a complete classical education to children all across Central and Eastern Africa. I believe in them so much I donate 10% of every paycheck to them and have given them $10s of thousands so far. My money went directly to give ~2,000 Ugandans more material than their city has ever known (population 500,000). Check them out.

All I know is that systemd has screwed up so many times on just dev vms I have to use for various clients' devwork, that there is NO WAY I'd ever put it on my production boxes! Gosh! There is something really wrong when PID 1 uses 1 MB of RAM, and something even worse when you can swear it has a memleak...

GNOME single-handedly fucked up the Linux ecosystem when they decided to make systemd a hard dependency!

However, I've had Gentoo (actually, Funtoo, as its git-based emerge is *much* faster!) as a production and development distro for 10 years now. As long as they remain sane and keep systemd *optional*, I'll just stick with them.

For all the others, Slackware, Gentoo and Funtoo seem about all that's left :-/

Sorry to break it to you, but you must be senile to still be on 2.6...

God dammit! UTF-8 support is still out! SMH!!! It's 2015 for crying out loud! 90%+ of the Net is already there!

I seriously think those are merely growing pains. Maybe they had a deadline to get it out before 2Q begins in April?

Why didn't they make the announcement of killing Beta SOONER!? like MONTHS ago when they decided to start working on this thing? POSSIBLY, it's because this could have been done out of a labor of love by one or more of the Slashdot devs and then they all ganged up on management and said, "Let us release this and kill Beta or we're all going to motherfracking strike, motherfackers!"

I like this possibility! IT would be very epic and apropos given how Beta would have surely killed off Slashdot in a matter of weeks.

It's been EXACTLY a year since Beta was forced down our throats and we staged the 2014 Valentines Day Slashcott!

WE WON!!!!!! The new interface is *really* nice, too! So win/win after we convinced Upper Management to jettison their ill-conceived desires?

WOOHOO!!!! As a 15+ year member of Slashdot, I look forward to the next 10 years now!!!

I was so anti-Beta I helped organize the 2014 Slashcott and I also had my own personal slashcott this Valentines Week, too. just last week.

I seriously doubt without our antics and loud voices that the corporate overlords of Slashdot would have seen the light, and the site would already have died of Betaitis months ago.

Jesus. Talk about replying to the wrong thread. I'll make it even more meta by replying to myself thrice :-/

Pipe down, Brother!

I was so anti-Beta I helped organize the 2014 Slashcott and I also had my own personal slashcott this Valentines Week, too. just last week.

I am happy to emphatically say that WE WON!!! Like you accurately point out. I seriously doubt without our antics and loud voices that the corporate overlords of Slashdot would have seen the light, and the site would already have died of Betaitis months ago.

Compared to how god awful Beta was and how forcing it on me would force me to become a literal Slashdot Refugee, I have to say, I will gladly sacrifice these missing links for the possibility of being able to use Slashdot for 10 more years!!

I wish they could have told us about this decision to jettison it MONTHS ago when they started working on it!! I've been living with a very real spectre of not being able to daily visit a site I absolutely love and is a big part of my entire adult life (17+ years) at ANY POSSIBLE DAY, and every time they announced planned outages, I shuddered inside and would start visiting other sites in preparation for the worst (nothing *but* Beta).

Hallelujah!

It's been EXACTLY a year since Beta was forced down our throats and we staged the 2014 Valentines Day Slashcott!

WE WON!!!!!! The new interface is *really* nice, too! So win/win after we convinced Upper Management to jettison their ill-conceived desires?

WOOHOO!!!! As a 15+ year member of Slashdot, I look forward to the next 10 years now!!!

I don't know, what we have *is* working with basic freedoms. I'll take liberty over cheap speeds any day.

So we can bring back PointCast?! Man, I used that service ALL THE TIME in the mid-to-late 1990s!!! I actually still miss it.