I am quite experienced in developing software (daily job for over a decade) and I wrote millions of lines of code. I don't use an IDE because I don't like to depend on much software while developing. It also helps to be portable (which is quite important!) and helps to hop to other workstations without headaches. And lastly an IDE does not have the power of a decent text editor (which is quite obvious, because such a decent text editor has been optimized for many years to support programmers and it can never compete with this massive crowd of people steadily improving things).

BUT...

... I don't like to tell people what they should use. Many people feel comfortable with an IDE because of the alternative form of completion and code navigation. This is ok, if they are efficient. If I was forced to use an IDE-based editor which does not integrate my favorite editor, I would miss about 95% actions which I use very intensively to get my work done quick. It's like some took away my hammer (tool) and gave me a shoe (wrong tool) to put a nail into a wall. I always say: it will work, but it will take longer, because it slows me down.

Fortunately, most people respect my choices because I am one of the more important developers in our company, but I can see that many companies actually force tools upon developers, which is quite bad in my opinion. Tools are always to be selected for a specific problem. Programming happens in the brain. Tools are just supporting the output. Consequently it does not depend on what tools you use to decide if you are a good developer (I admit, it can be a hint) but on the way you approach problems.

As a FreeBSD user, I laugh here silently about all your Linux problems. It's funny to see Linux distributions still use this SystemV crap, when everyone else already offers modern solutions for this. Linux does not even have an adequate devd/devfs solution, redesigned the dev-system several times and it is still bad. Now you get what you deserve... systemd and we can even laugh harder at you.

The only thing that hurts is probably that systemd might become the next hald oder consolekit which costed everyone years of development in wrong direction.

Sometimes, it would make sense to take a look at how others solve problems and learn from it (instead of re-inventing the wheel wrong the 4th time).

The kill switch has its name, because now the mugger needs to kill the one who he stole the mobile phone from to make sure that he does not report it as stolen.

Yes. I like the beta Slashdot's new feature not being able to visit the article view on Android's Firefox. It reminds me that I should go back to coding. And of course, everyone likes that you need at least an i7 CPU to scroll the web pages softly.

I started on KDE pre-1.0 versions... they crashed all the time (KDE still crashes occasionally, btw!). I found Gnome ... (no not really Gnome, but the underlying framework GTK) the most usable and I've been using Gnome for very long. Then I noticed how slow the desktop is and searched for lighter alternatives... Xfce seemed to be nice, but I did not like the weird look it had at that time. So I landed back on Gnome again.

Gnome2 was long time my desktop until I've seen what they plan for Gnome3. I also tried Ubuntu to see how Gnome3 works. Gladly, FreeBSD did not import Gnome3 long time, so I could use Gnome2 a bit longer. But at that time I also began to learn about alternatives and notice how much crap Gnome2 and Gnome3 has running in background. I started to learn how a TRUE Xorg desktop should look like and decided that KDE and neither Gnome are like cancer to Xorg.

Someone on IRC mentioned Ion as a tiling WM. I got interested and tried it. At that time I was really lazy with configuring desktop manually. Ion3 had a license dispute with FreeBSD and it disappeared from ports. I decided not to use it, because all the resulting annoyances. But I remembered tiling WMs as being useful, IF one wants to use keyboard hotkeys.

I tried to go with Fluxbox... but it was a bit annoying at some points and I changed to the sister project Openbox. I liked Openbox very much. I also noticed that a terminal is far more important. I started to ignore file managers from now on. This has been an important change. I always preferred a desktop with a decent file manager, because one thing I considered to be annoying is doing simple file operations in the terminal. It changed to the opposite now and I rather began to think how to write efficient desktop macros and scripts to make everything more fluent. I also themed my desktop in different ways and decided NOT to use any eye candy, because it is simply not improving the usability and neither efficiency. One thing I learned with Openbox is that vertical screen space is important and that I prefer to have my windows at the left screen edge. Consequently, I've put the lxpanel at the right screen edge. What also was very important for me is to manage my desktop configuration in Git, because I re-used my desktop on other PCs and merged the differences for special parts in a way that I did not need to think about what platform I use and which host it is.

I was pretty satisfied with Openbox so far, but I decided not to sit on it all the time, because I might ignore the developing new desktops. I tried Gnome2/3 and KDE again... and found them HORRIBLE(!) after using Openbox for a longer period of time. I decided to look at other WMs and found Xmonad which people mostly laughed at as a joke being that minimalist. I tried it... and FAILED horribly... I noticed that I need to learned Haskell... at least a bit.

It took a long time... I learned some Haskell... and it is quite fun, I can tell you. I tried Xmonad again and copied some of the useful configurations. I also put them in my Git repo. I found it far easier to manage different platforms and hosts, because Haskell is a full-featured programming language.

It started as a joke... Xmonad... but after configuring the details, I can see how much more productivity and usability increased. I admit that I would not recommend to anyone to use Xmonad... by why the hell do I need to tell you what to choose or convince people about efficiency of Xmonad. This is YOUR personal preference and it always ends in annoying flamewars. I just recommend one thing... take a look at the desktops... it will take some time... and you will even need to (OMG!) actually LEARN something to use it properly.

And one thing is sure... I will never say that Xmonad is my last word... I will take a look at everything I find and never give up to give a project a chance... even KDE and Gnome (when there are some notable changes).

... they will still need to be warned.

Since FreeBSD is one of the top distributions, even appearing on Linux-centric sites as mentionable: http://distrowatch.com/dwres.p...

You can buy cheap water in any super market.

But beer?? Beer is pure and the symbol of nature and life. We need to watch Football (no, I don't mean your stupid handegg!). Do you want to destroy German culture? Do you want that we go back to Naziland times? It is unacceptable to destroy beer. Isn't it obvious?

No we don't. The German government is full of lobbyists. And we are ruled by politicians who don't give a flying fart about people (CDU/CSU party), only about bigger corporations.

I wouldn't have a problem with delegation of one's personal security responsibilities when predictable things like Comodo or Diginotar would not happen. But they do... and it's pretty obvious. Second thing is that I have not seen anyone taking CRLs seriously with S/MIME, yet.

Use PGP/GPG for god's sake. Since when do you delegate encryption and integrity to any gateways? You cannot trust ANYONE except yourself when signing private documents. Do you delegate signatures in sensitive and confidential cases to your co-workers?

Also, there is no (native) Flash for FreeBSD and I don't like to clutter my system with any Linux compatibility layers.

I think that browser plugins are deprecated technology from the 90s. I cannot remember if I ever had Flash installed. Maybe I had it once because it was (pre)installed automatically on some systems. But I can live without it since... ehm... the first time I've had access to internet(sometime in the 90s?).

Everyone who likes Unix-like systems won't install any lennartware on his system. Everything I ever installed which was written by Lennart Poettering does not work. Beware... he also has his fingers in the Fedora distribution.

systemd causes extremely weird behavior of the hardware (simple things like the power switch do not work anymore, cannot shutdown the PC anymore, even after pressing the power switch for 5 seconds! wtf??).

The pulseaudio stuff never worked for me... consequently I install my whole system directly on alsa, because I need sound support and no choking applications. Sometimes you cannot even login, because some desktop environments want to play the start sound.

Avahi is pure shit... networking is even less confusing without it. Avoiding it means: less confusing system. And think about it: actually it comes from "zeroconf" which suggest that everything is easier.

xdg-system is simply annoying. I have never seen any software using such a weird kind of logic: try Gnome/KDE/... start facilities, not supported, then open file with $BROWSER (this isn't even a well-known environment variable), if $BROWSER is not set, use Firefox... wtf??!! When I don't have Firefox... this is bad and when I already open the URI in Firefox it is just worse! xdg is actually doing nothing that is useful.

Please Lennart... use brain when developing applications.

I have never understood it. When I have pulseaudio running many processes which try to play music stop, because they are waiting for the sound device to become idle. This was also the reason why Gnome could not be able to login.

When using FreeBSD I even switch all this Linux daemon crap off. OSS can do audio mixing natively and I have never had problems with it... I even did not know about all the problems which exist on Linux with all these audio daemons. This seems to be a total mess.

Why does SMART suck?

When I watch the SMART values and events I can tell about 3 weeks in advance before a hard drive fails. Also, the manufacturers watch the SMART values to check if a replacement can be offered or if you made some mistake.

To me SMART does not lie, but reports too much. It reports every replaced sector which is totally unimportant, especially when you buy a new hard drive, you will find faulty sectors in 50% of cases (quite normal). The hard drive with few faulty sectors on day one will function for decades correctly.