Designed in California

funny that you would recommend debian for a good KDE experience. KDE issues were the reason I moved from debian wheezy) to arch on the desktop and suddenly all my pet quirks are gone. Just look at kdepim and all the version mixing debian does here, essentially keeping kdepim frozen at some ancient level (4.5x, if memory serves me right) which just doesn't work. Just try syncing a google calendar account (with many different calendars) to KOrganizer and you see what I mean.
At some point in time I had enough of feeling like a second class debian citizen with KDE treated like a unbeloved step child in so many ways.
The first steps with arch are a bit rough but once you have it set up KDE runs so much better. KDE is covered in the (excellent) wiki documentation and I don't need a cron job to delete ~/.xsession-errors just to keep it from flooding my home partition.

That said, there are some distros that come with KDE as the default DE and thus promise a more polished experience. SuSE for one.

no encryption of mail transfer?

The summary is almost unreadable, too

Lets assume there comes a major shift away from the desktop and into tablets or similar "touchable" devices and ex-Metro is their attempt to prepare for it (and for once not sleep over the next big thing) then "temporarily" might mean: give some market share away in the old field in order to get ahead of the competition in the new one, gaining market share there that more than makes good for the lost.
Personally I have difficulties to believe this will actually happen. I just can't see myself programming on a tablet.
I agree you can have a decent desktop with Linux, some actually. My desktop is KDE, there are six or seven alternatives. Gnome 2, Gnome 3, Mate, Cinnamon, Unity, XFCE, LXDE. Lots of choice, may to much of it for some organizations' taste.

hahahaha, if I had one of my mod points left I'd give it a funny

Lightning, the calendar - addon for thunderbird, is the only aspect of thunderbird development where I feel some work is still needed, but apparently there are no resources available for it. For years.

This may turn out to be somewhat offtopic, I'm not at all sure about the actual relation of the sunbird/lightning and the thunderbird dev team and whether the decision has effects for the lightning development.
However, thunderbird and lightning are so tightly integrated that deficiencies in lightning look like thunderbird problems to me.

I think of tasks administration in lightning:
- support for hierarchical tasks (allow subtasks)
- sync with Google Tasks

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194863 is nine years old and still has status New.

As to Android it is not true that it does not support IPv6, my HTC Desire displays v6-only web sites just fine when it connects via wlan, k9 connects to the mail server on v6, even the kWS web server on the Desire is reachable from outside on IPv6.
But IPv6 support is incomplete http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3389 (long entry with various issues)

They might be waiting for the tech savvy slashdot folks to lead the way...

; > DiG 9.8.1-P1 > aaaa slashdot.org ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 26261 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

Had to look into my tunnelbroker.net account: it's already 4 years of running it. About once a year there is some hiccup at their Frankfurt node, I 'll write a mail to their support stuff then and about 20 mins later some friendly supportnic asks me to check if I can still repro the problem...
And free dns server (ipv6-ready, with glue records), and free ipv6 training & certification - HE has been really helpful for me,

This is IPv6 Launch day. He needs to go to 2a00:1450:4016:801::1000

; > DiG 9.8.1-P1 > slashdot.org aaaa ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 48554 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

because hex looks ugly? sort of embarrassing for a geek news place.

I won't buy it unless you can show me how the CIA (or another 3-letter organization) is secretly in bed with them ...