This reminds me of a recent feature in The Guardian, which calls for the preservation of a nuclear power plant in Snowdonia, Wales since it was designed by the British modernist architect Sir Basil Spence. Linky.

I guess that's true now for the core OS install (it wasn't in the past) but on Windows I find I spend a lot of time messing about installing the different pieces of 3rd party software I need. Even when I know the names of all of the software I need, it still involves bouncing around a bunch of websites, sitting through all different installers, often being asked to reboot each time.

In Linux, I find the path to getting a full system much quicker, since it's just a case of going into the package manager, clicking the things I want then playing solitaire while the things download and install automagically. Oh, and it pretty much only needs a restart for kernel updates.

In the article it is mentioned that nepomuk will be moving in 4.4 to a new backend, which offers improved performance. Perhaps this will include a reduced memory footprint. Anyway, if you don't like it, it is very easy to turn off: System Settings -> Advanced tab -> Desktop Search -> The first checkbox.

Well actually I don't think they should have marked it as release, I think it's hard to argue any other way seeing how things turned out. However, upstream software providers can screw things up. Distros should act to shield their users from these screw-ups, by judiciously selecting the package versions that will give the best experience for their users. In the case of the KDE 4.0 release, I think the distros completely failed to do this. So I think they deserve some share of the blame.

IMO a lot of the blame for the KDE 4.0 pain lies with the distros. So KDE 4.0 wasn't ready for prime time, too bad. So why the hell were certain distros inflicting it upon their users if it wasn't ready? Couldn't they have tested it, noticed that it wasn't ready, and waited before deploying it? I really don't know what they were thinking. My distro of choice (Arch Linux) waited til KDE4 was done before rolling it out, and Arch mainly aims to be on the bleeding edge most of the time. In fact I installed 4.0 anyway, because I wanted to try it out, but I really appreciated Arch's common sense in handling the matter. Not so for too many of the other distros though.

I don't think you need to be worrying about KDE 5.0 for a little while, but even if it does turn up sometime soon-ish, there's no reason why it needs to be as painful as 4.0. For example, the change from KDE 2 to KDE 3 was pretty smooth. Even if this hypothetical 5.0 release was a major change from the KDE 4 series, I would imagine that the KDE devs might learn from past mistakes (gasp!) and do things differently this time around.

Yes, quite, I wouldn't be surprised. Or maybe it could have been due to political content, but maybe they have a good reason. Perhaps the whole reason they have these organisations is that delicate matters of international politics can be raised in a very neutral and controlled way. I have to point out that I'm not a diplomat or whatever and I've never organised one of these things (putting me in the same boat as pretty much every other Slashdotter commenting on this story), but imagine how pissed off you would be if you had spent all that effort getting important people together into a room from all over the world to talk about things with important global consequences, and the whole thing was scuppered because a bunch of idiots put up posters that led some of the delegates to believe that the hosting organisation was biased against them from the start or politically compromised in some other way.

Now I support free speech, I think it's a good and important thing. However, if everyone is packed into a room, all shouting their viewpoints at the same time so nobody can really hear or be heard above the din, then what bloody good is that? In that situation, I think that free speech would be best served by someone getting everyone to shut the hell up, then organising a way to let everyone say what they want to say without being shouted over by other people. I think the UN is like a much more complicated version of that situation there; you need to have strict protocols controlling how opinions are expressed and viewpoints are put across, or else the whole thing will descend into chaos.

Also, TFA has a quote:

Well, you can do a quick Google search and download a PDF of the conference programme. Apart from the hilarious mistake in naming one of the delegates as "Ms. Bruce Schneier", the programme also details a talk on Security, Openness and Privacy, which includes the following topics:
* The respect for privacy as a business advantage;
* Cultural and technical perspectives on the regulation of illegal Web contents;
* Regulatory models for privacy;
* Ensuring the open architecture of the Internet;
* Enabling frameworks for freedom;
* Ethical dimensions of the Internet.

So perhaps they will be discussing those topics after all - but discussing them perhaps according to some stricter protocol for the reasons I mentioned above. Again, I'd like to point out that I don't actually know anything about all this UN conference business, I'm really just trying to point out that maybe there's something more complicated going on than some of the other comments on here are suggesting.

Whaaaa? God forbid! Dolphin is a great file manager, as I type this I am actually in the process of installing KDE for Windows just so I can use Dolphin instead of Windows Explorer. Explorer doesn't even have a split-pane mode that I can find, and it seems to go out of its way to hide useful things from me. God knows there are many good ideas Gnome/KDE could borrow from Windows/OS X (and vice-versa) but Windows Explorer definitely isn't one of them. Jeeez. PS I don't have Dolphin to hand (installing it right now as I said before) but I'm almost 100% certain it has a list/detail view type thing.

Here on Slashdot today, not only did two people make a joke about an obscure techincal configuration option of the Linux kernel, we both made the same joke, and we made it one minute apart. This place is terrifying.

Depends if they set CONFIG_NO_HZ=y :P

I think you're making a reasonable point, but I have to disagree. I'm not sure why I should have to come up with the answers for the content providers, since there are presumably a number of people who are employed by those companies to devise a suitably profitable business model which actually attracts some paying customers. Now I do agree that in saying this I'm probably being a bit intellectually lazy, but I say it's no more lazy than those content providers who are just trying to hang on to the same old way of doing business by offering a single, undesirable course for the future (DRM everywhere) which few informed customers seem to actually want.

However, I'm going to offer a solution anyway, because I think it's an interesting discussion. I'd say that it would be better to offer streaming, on-demand content. If the network capacity isn't up to it today, it should be in a few years' time. I watch Channel 4's on-demand service, which even includes ad breaks. I could probably find a way to rip the streams and fast-forward through the adverts, or I could download the shows on BitTorrent. But all that's too much hassle, the streaming web service is convenient, so I just use that instead and watch the ads, along with many other people I know. Instead of each network having its own site, they could re-sell content to central distributors, where you could go to one site and view content from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky and everyone else. Make it free, supported with ads (for BBC content people can get it ad-free by going to the BBC site direct, there would have to be a link next to every BBC show) or have a subscription service with fewer ads or none at all. For uninterrupted films, maybe have a surcharge of a couple of quid (not a flippin' fiver to watch bloody Die Hard one time only, thankyouverymuch) which just gets added to your monthly bill.

If access to content is easy and reasonably priced, then I don't think piracy should be too much of a worry. It will always happen to some extent, but as long as they can turn a decent profit, then that's just one of those facts of life. No need for all of this protected path DRM BS then. However, I still think that DRM is crappy enough that consumers are right to reject it out of hand, without equivocation or writing the content providers' business model for them. We're the ones paying, after all.

You could also have tabbed through the buttons (just like on Windows) til you reached apply. It takes a bit of guesswork, but it's certainly a lot easier than reinstalling. More advanced users would be able to shift-tab, knowing the apply button is near the end (I correctly guessed this at two shift-tabs on my first attempt). Also I suspect many users would have guessed that Apply has a keyboard shortcut, and that the shortcut would be Alt-A. That is standard underliney shortcut behaviour like on Windows, what do they call them, accelerators or something? Anyway, no offence mate, but you really ought to have figured a solution out without having to reinstall the whole flipping OS.

I do agree with you to a point though, Windows does handle this situation a bit better. However, you can't just take a single pet peeve and use it to claim that one OS is better than the other. Do you think WIndows is entirely without similar usability screw-ups? Or Mac OS? As a long-time Linux user, Windows frequently leaves me fuming, simply because it insists on doing so many things in a way that seems brain-dead from a Linux user's perspective.

Maybe Linux isn't as beginner-friendly as Windows. Maybe not though. Comments such as yours do nothing to prove it either way.