The mobile touchscreen world probably needs a linux OS. Thing is, there are some many of them (some were corporate like Intel, Samsung, Nokia) but they are nowhere to be seen in the real world. So maybe it's not so bad that Ubuntu is doing an almost available one, which is closer than the other ones were.

Thing is I consider all the phones unsuitable for gaming (no buttons) and the input or even output is so limited it's a fucking chore to go in the menus, file managers, command line etc.
I can "hack" it? (e.g. tie it to a desktop and do some unsupported crap to enable some features that are just regular ones on usual computers). I can have a "root prompt"? Yeah. I'll do that (if I can peck the keyboard keys in less than a minute) and hope this works : find / -iname '*google*'|xargs rm -rf.

Phone users wants video / music (perhaps no video use unless it's easier to find the stuff on youtube), calendars, messaging etc. and then the killer app is the web.

Who cares if the back end is horrible? It could be perl or Tcl/Tk, doesn't matter much if it gets out of the way. Not having to invest yourself in an "ecosystem" with compatibility concerns like the desktops OSes is good. Horrible slow and bloaty javascript is dealt with bruce force (dual 1.2GHz CPU, 512MB RAM..) like phones did over 10 years ago with Java ME on about 1/20th the specs.
Half-baked.. Why care, have you seen the screenshots?, fonts, typography and color scheme look excellent. That's well-baked. And the resolution is high (800x480 on 4". It's 160x128 on regular phones and it was 160x144 on the Game Boy)

Importantly FF OS is the only one out anyway.

That's interesting, many "unexpected" little situations pile up, some of them legitimate and some of them less. I'm honestly seeing quite some of them on linux
e.g. acessing NTFS and serving the content over ssh - that's pretty legit due to a user space file system and use of encryption ; launching a little GUI to a software synth uses some CPU and pulseaudio is using a ton, there's some bug.. have to upgrade the distro and I guess it will disappear (None of that before upgrading to what I have, but pulseaudio had some other bugs). Xorg sometimes uses much CPU, never knew why. A gnome game locks up, using 99.9% of one CPU core.

Most funny is on a single core computer playing youtube or soundcloud for music. Software updates make the music hang!, they're usually pretty quick enough thanksfully. (I'll renice plugin-container next time?)
I guess many seemingly mundane software embed a database and what not. Perhaps it's not all bad. In "good old times" we used to have system-level crashes, explorer.exe crashes, file system corruption and data loss all the time. Firefox still crashes but remembers the data.

In fairness there's something about it in the release notes, and a workaround that seems farily easy (no dicking around in the command line)

http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_q...

Amstrad CPC6128 was very successful, especially popular in Europe - cheap price as a dedicated monitor was always bundled and a floppy drive was integrated, whereas other stuff like C64, Spectrum etc. tended to be used with a cassette drive and on the television.

It's not a killer machine, though. Rudimentary sound and no sprites - but it was colorful, with 16 colors out of a 32 color palette (much better than 8 fixed colors on some of the 8bit crap :p)
Then it did have an upgrade that made it a "killer 8-bit"! These were the ill-fated CPC Plus and GX-4000 console. Typical fate of an upgraded model and a failed, unsupported console. It didn't help that the year was 1990, well into the times of Amiga 500 and Megadrive/Genesis and NES utterly dominating the game consoles.

France had that usual Colbertian, Louis XIV attitude of über strong centralization applied to nearly everything, so you have a single giant company (formerly 100% state owned, now 84% state owned) managing well over 50 nuclear reactors, and another virtually 100% state owned company dealing with plant building and the whole fuel cycle.

I guess that is what the nuclear industry needs. It's as if you had a company headquartered in Washington D.C., owned at 100% by the Department of Energy that operated all the 210 or so reactors. I guess that for many US readers such an idea would lead to many raised or frowned eyebrows. (But the US situation is almost like Mr Burns owning a single nuclear plant and nothing else and that isn't sustainable)
I wish the European Union could be used for such endeavours. And, I have some many anarchist tendancies but when it comes to such things as this I'm a big Statist. It's like single payer healthcare, where the giant government thing is actually twice as efficient as private industry : the more "privatized" the system is, the more issues of undercoverage, surveillance and endless paperwork, effectively dozens or hundreds fiefdoms of power are created that leech off people and have the absolute word on what they can and cannot do. (I'm dwelling off-topic here to address some philosophical issue)

Varying the production more often and with more amplitude decreases the efficiency and increases the maintenance costs. Maybe that's a claim by the power industries but that seems to be a legit one.
Like, this stuff is not free and to just build solar and wind capacity (whose nominal megawatts/gigawatts are inflated and capacity factor overestimated) while not caring about the grid is myopic and stupid.

Wind is especially problematic as it can fall off a cliff from one hour to the next and this may happen country-wide.
Mind you I believe I'm a pretty hard line environmentalist next to most everyone. I "hate" all those renewables because Germany has shown up what actually happens when you apply the dogmatic, simplistic no-thinking thinking. Higher costs for everyone who pays and the CO2 emissions increasing.

I believe we need new industries that can consume the intermittent surplus energy.
E.g. a place that manages a fleet of light trucks (for companies to use and for people to rent for the day), that perhaps routinely does battery swaps, where a shit ton of battery charging happens when it's the cheapest but the power use is strongly coupled to consumption goals, updated every 5 minutes and they may quickly collapse or rise back as dictated by the utility provider or some kind of regulatory structure. I'll call that a "push smartgrid".

Chemical industry with a production that can easily be scaled up/down or rather "scaled out", as per the computer jargon. Well I hope such things can be done (with "reverse fuel cells", water treatment/dessalination, or who knows what) and obviously there would be a lot of engineering and investment needed.

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.