Mesa/nouveau are released under an MIT license. Any time MS want to hire their core developers, the option is there.

(1) I'm not sure on the specifics of phones/watches but in my country, one can claim as a tax deductibility a 'salary sacrifice' if equipment is used for work purposes. e.g. that $70/month shiny iPhone 6 plan might be subsidized by the government if you BYOD but maybe not if it's purely for personal use.

(2) I'm surprised hypervisors with dual SIM haven't caught on yet. i.e. you run your own personal stack as the host OS and work provides you with a secure encrypted image to load as the guest OS. That way they only have control of the virtualized environment which is remotely scrubbed on employment termination or theft.

HP had their chance to create an internet of things niche when they bought Palm.

WebOS lives on only at lg

'Fast' is relative.

The question is whether 10 is as responsive as 7. MS specifically tuned 7 to run on low-end hardware, such as this netbook.

Unstable is fairly conservative about the bleeding edge.

Pick a different distro if you want to try Wayland or, say, KDE5.

Well I for one am content with a 'dumbphone'.

I have a desktop PC for my computing needs and the cloud services I need while in transit are adequately served by the web. If I'm restless on public transport I'll whip out my e-reader and read a chapter of a book rather than fiddling with an app.

nice cartoon!

I'm still Google-OS free after nearly a year of Firefox OS.

The inbuilt email client mightn't be quite as slick as the Gmail app but it's way more usable than Google's mobile mail web page. Facebook feels lighter than the app on my old HTC. I use the web interface of the old reader since I never found an RSS reader on Android I was comfortable with. Here Maps from Nokia does the job, even if it's not Google.

A heavy app user would feel cheated, I guess. But I'm a cheapskate who never *purchased* a single app from Google Play and 90% of the time I am more than content with a dumb phone running on bleeding-edge Gecko, which is smoother than Android browsers on similar hardware.

That HTC runs Kitkat via cyanogenmod, which I've since donated to my 73yo mother. She finds Android heavy and confusing - her daughter-in-law thinks she'd be better off with a shiny new iPhone. As an experiment, we recently swapped handsets - she found Firefox OS cleaner and more intuitive and was reluctant to give it back after a week, except for the apps she'd be missing - mainly from MS (Office for viewing mail attachments and Skype)

Last I checked, Europe didn't border the Pacific Ocean, save a few miscellaneous islands owned by Britain and France.

meanwhile the folks at soylent implemented it ages ago.

With all the effort wasted on 'beta', I wonder how much of the open source slashcode remains.

It would be nice if someone had converted that to metric.

~ 2.5kg.

Only 1 of my 3 computers has a working optical drive in any case.

Live CDs now make use of a quirk in the ISO format to allow writable partitions on a 'burnt' USB key, if I'm not mistaken.

People still use flashdisks, with 'the cloud' and 2TB USB3 drives? :-)

Migrate to Geany.

It's a GTK+ text editor that works on both Linux and Windows and has a configurable toolbar.

otoh, Hacker News has a pro-MS anti-FOSS slant.

I got savagely downvoted there by suggesting you *should* look a gift horse in the mouth when it came to 'free shit' from Microsoft.

that POS called Firefox OS

Have you tried it recently? I'm running a nightly 3.0 on my phone which has served me well for the past 12 months.

FxOS got a series of bad reviews based on early releases and nasty hardware but is evolving.