It's used by the Gimp. Seriously!
Also, major environments : XFCE, Mate, LXDE ; and many major or common applications. Some of them support a choice of GTK2 or Qt, or GTK2 and GTK3.

No need to break stuff.. And the Gnome team owns GTK3, and has shown itself rather hostile to developers. GTK1 is completely dead, but GTK2 will probably stick around just like some other stuff does (motif, Tk, and the kind of stuff that was already ugly in 1989)

As long as doing that sort of thing won't kill people by carbon monoxide poisoning, sure.

But many people who made GTK3 themes were alienated by the spec changing at every minor version. I have no idea if the thing is settled now, plus a theme has to support GTK2 apps so what is needed is a combined theme working for two or more versions..
Not sure if that's the only reason but e.g. Linux Mint comes with one single theme. I have not tried to get others.

xcalc is pretty good as a basic calculator, not too ugly and right mix of small but not hiding stuff like 1/x, trig and x^y.

One cost-effective method is called "wood", but while it's underutilized in some first world countries it is grossly overexploited in some other countries (and even causes respiratory diseases)

I use NetworkManager - as it doesn't hang or something on that particular computer and looks good enough, I did not rip it out for wicd - and it does automatically connect to a wifi network, but that does not give actual connectivity on a public or semi-public hotspot. There's still the task of opening a web browser page, have it "hijacked" by the hotspot and do whatever is needed there.

I recommend Filezilla to people for that task, it's DE-independant and OS independant too (runs on both Windows and Linux, probably on others).

Nemo is great, I ran some Mate franken-desktop with it ; now Mate's caja got even more similar (as a fork of Nautilus 2.x) so I believe you would find it to be a very decent option, would you be running a Mate desktop.
May I say how I like pcmanfm, too. Though I don't feel like I can easily try the latest version on my current OS.
It seems like all nautilus clones are great, except nautilus itself.

What is leftist about it? Free subsidies to corporations and a lack of will to do anything about global warming is a right-wing thing.

Wrong : the 80% efficiency is not electricity but heat + electricity. Or that is what I understand. 80% eletric efficiency would be big news. And even then, maybe the figure is optimistic i.e. apply perfect black paint to a piece of cardboard and you have a 100% efficient device, even though it's of no pratical use.

I hate Gnome 3 as much as anyone, but I once used it on a computer which I assume was probably just debian wheezy (when wheezy was still late testing). It seemed decent at showing one or two windows seemingly guessing where I wanted them to be moved to.. Maybe I can't explain myself about it. It seemed very good at managing a handful terminal and browser windows. While not providing something like a taskbar. Kind of an OpenGL accelerated, black-themed Windows 3.1.

It's not a real desktop environment, but if you have a computer with a recent enough GPU and good enough I/O it might be usable if you think of it as a window manager.

but my terminal says :

No command 'term' found, did you mean:
  Command 'aterm' from package 'aterm' (universe)
  Command 'aterm' from package 'aterm-ml' (universe)
  Command 'bterm' from package 'bogl-bterm' (main)
  Command 'terd' from package 'tcm' (universe)
  Command 'kterm' from package 'kterm' (universe)
  Command 'xterm' from package 'xterm' (main)
  Command 'ferm' from package 'ferm' (universe)
  Command 'pterm' from package 'pterm' (universe)
  Command 'qterm' from package 'qterm' (universe)
  Command 'qterm' from package 'torque-client-x11' (universe)
  Command 'qterm' from package 'torque-client' (universe)
term: command not found

If I'm in an environment I'm not familiar with (perhaps I never used it at all) I will expect that alt-f2 on *nix or win+r on Windows will give me a "run box" that works at least with raw executable names, but maybe not more than that. So on a random *nix desktop (but maybe not twm or any random weird stuff) I'll hit alf-f2 and then xterm, on Windows I'll hit win+r and then cmd. So I could e.g. shut down Windows 8 the old way without trying to figure out the GUI way.

Not sure what the new wifi feature really is, but if it can automatically log in to the wifi network instead of you doing it with a browser that's a mildly useful and convenient feature.
For such a feature to be robust there would be a need for the user to set up that automatic login though (e.g. using epiphany-browser). Some will just require username/password (first form entry/second form entry) but others have a "I agree to terms of service" checkbox and some others might be different still.

If you're going to "change the runlevel to a non graphical startup", you probably know already to hit ctrl-alt-f1 to switch to a VT console, or maybe alt-f2 (then launch xterm) as somewhat of a standard in older gnome and other desktop environments?
That'd be easier than finding the terminal in Mac OS X.
By the way, I once had trouble finding the terminal in Unity. I don't know what the executable's name is. But xterm is always there, so I could type "xterm" somewhere and have it launched.

How often do people sit on a *cupholder*? Car fellatio gone wrong?

But these give you heat as well. It's kind of a heat collector with solar panel piggy backed on. I suppose it saves space and is serviced by the same company, which may not be true of using heat collectors + solar panels, though I'm not sure of the economics. Also where a power grid is available, I would favor using heat collectors alone for heating/cooling/warm water and power grid for power (duh).