Some people describe Lollipop as beautiful.

They're all smoking the same bad drugs.

I still consider XP to have a toy-like appearance. If I have to run Windows, I always try to get it to look as much like Win2k as possible. Win7 out of the box was actually kind of pretty, but too glossy to be usable. It was still much nicer than the current offerings.

If by "you all" you mean the ivory tower UX morons, you're right.

Flat is ugly, no matter who's doing it. Yes, it really does seem like it's a bandwagon everybody seems to think they have to jump on. Each new version of Windows gets uglier, each new version of Android gets uglier, each new version of IOS gets uglier, and so on. Linux is not immune -- each new version of Gnome or KDE also gets uglier, at least out of the box. With Linux it's at least possible to do some customization.

Apple seems to have traded in "beauty" for "design" and "style" for "fashion." They're not the same.

No, never did. I've never really had much contact with the Apple world -- I have the one Powerbook available to me, but it's mainly set on the shelf since its fit with what I need to do wasn't as good as my Lenovo running Linux.

Not really. I don't especially care what other people do. But it does mean that a Linux desktop will continue to be more useful to me than MacOS. It was suggested that a Mac made a good replacement for my Linux desktop since it was so Unixy. But the part that matters to me really isn't.

Now, if Wayland comes along and eliminates those benefits on Linux, and if X itself ends up going away... Well, I guess I'm just going to have to start kicking people off my lawn.

I hadn't been aware of XQuartz. However, looking at what I've found about it, I get the impression it only gives those benefits to X apps. In other words, native apps would still behave in their normal manner. Is that correct?

Since what I'm primarily using is a text editor and a web browser (I grade student homework in the browser and paste in my boilerplate "correct" answers from the text file) I'm not sure that XQuartz would do me any good. The apps I would be using would still not get the focus and cut and paste goodness of X.

I tried using OSX to replace my Linux desktop. Some parts were pretty usable, but inability to set a useful focus policy and the really cumbersome way that cut and paste works made it ultimately too hard to get anything done.

I like being able to copy text from a window that is *not* on top and paste it into a window that may or may not be on top -- without them re-arranging their order. With MacOS each copy and paste involved multiple clicks, all of which invlved the Z-order flipping all around. Slowed me down enormously.

Exactly. All the UX people on all platforms somehow got ahold of the same bad drugs.

Yeah, when I see the phrases "UX love" and "Most beautiful", the first thing I think of is "Gods, they've hit it with the ugly stick." Flat, flat, flat.

A few years ago an English professor contact the Computer Science department to see if we could read some 5 1/4 floppies. She wanted to re-start an old novel she had been working on. I still had a computer at home with a 5 1/4 drive. Her disk format was toast, but I was able to `dd` an image and use `strings` to pull most of the text back. She was happy.

A couple of years after that someone else asked if we could read another 5 1/4. I still had the drive but I had upgraded the motherboard and no longer had a floppy controller to use.

I just threw away half a dozen (or so) 3-button mice, some still in the box. All were PS/2 connectors and ball mice.

There was an e-waste disposal event in the neighborhood and I took the opportunity to clean the spare room out.

Thank you for this. I had disabled Flashblock, and my web experience had gotten annoying. Hoping the Greasemonkey script in that bug report will let me re-enable it.

Well, it did take some effort, because some services that I have been using since long before G+ reduced their utility and moved some functions into G+. Google Talk became Hangouts, and some things that were part of Talk started requiring a plus account. Reviews of Android Apps now require G+.

That meant that I had to get out of the habit of using those functions or sign up. Each time I tried to use one I'd get a dialog telling me that I needed to sign up for Google+ to use that function. Sometimes I'd even start to fill in the registration before I thought better of it and backed out.

Well, Facebook's policies are no better than Google+ was. But I don't use any Facebook services other than Facebook itself, and if I lost access to Facebook it would be a minor annoyance. If I lost access to my non-plus Google services it would be a much bigger problem.

You're right that the G+ policy has been changed, although it doesn't seem that long ago to me. Maybe I just hold a grudge for a long time. In any case, it tainted their brand in my eyes, and it will be a long time before I forget that.

That's pretty much it. Google was being pretty hard core about their real name policy on Google+, to the degree that people who Google determined had violated it ended up having their entire Google collection of services canceled.

Since I *do* use lots of Google services, but don't really care about the social media part, I never signed up for Google+. I didn't want to take the chance of losing the services I did value.

By the time they finally saw sense and dropped the requirement, I didn't care enough to sign up.