There are many distributions: openSUSE, Fedora, Mint are common ones.

Maybe they wanted to avoid the negative publicity that comes with; maybe they were forced to do it now because they just found a severe defect in one of their most successful products. Maybe I'm just paranoid

Since when have you been smoking high quality double-concentrate reinforced crack?. Even the worst bug-infested 4.0.1 KDE version allowed you multiple desktops. They would just crash multiple times but they were there.

Actually KDE now allows you two different levels of multiplicity: desktops and activity. Where multiple desktops pretty much works as always, activities let you configure different sets of desktop applets (plasmoids), application started by default and more stuff. I personally do not use it, as I find it confusing, but you cannot complain it does not exist.

i agree that git is a great tool, especially when i do not have to use it; as Linus Torvalds put it, git stands for:

1. “Global information tracker”: you’re in a good mood, and it actually works for you. Angels sing and light suddenly fills the room.
2. “Goddamn idiot truckload of sh*t”: when it breaks.

One specific use of git that i love, and where you never have to touch git at all, is SparkleShare, granted that i self host it in a mini NAS

Only if you are going faster than the speed of sound

I was pretty evident it was a kid project from the responses they were giving. The hard truth is that operating systems are not lolcat pictures, somebody care about copyright. Nevertheless, the kids would have abandoned the project in a few weeks, after finding a girlfriend or discovering pot; no big loss for the OSS community.

blah blah blah

I forgot the most important point: no automatic way to keep track of security and critical bug fixes. Installing from source is only easy (not easier) as long as you are installing a single packet.

This is absolutely not true. Installing from source is the worst way possible from the point of view of system consistency and cleaness.

First of all there is no check for files overwrite, i.e. if you install 2 version of the same library you do not know what you will get.

Then there is no uninstall mechanism, unless you keep the configured sources, and even if there is one it is left to the good will of the package make: no automatic way to track the modified files.

Then you need the development files for all the dependencies of the package you are going to install; which takes a lot of space and scatter further files around your disk.

Finally, it takes a lot of time, both human and cpu; nowadays it may not be so bad, but with 10 years ago internet and cpus t would take many hours to download and configure the linux kernel or any other 10k-lines package.

Saying that something is good just because it's old, or more technically complex is just stupid elitism. I do not think it's helping linux desktop at all

tar = tape archiver

as in, it used to be a tape backup program

it was abused to become an installer format by slackware, but just any .tar won't do, it has to include special files with pre- and post-scripts and more stuff.

Especially when you are switching to a bug-infested ubuntu clone

Actually: open dolphin, click on "network", click on "samba shares", browse. No need to read any documentation.

you mean, gnome 3 is not even for techies?