I haven't said Voyager was "very good".

All I said that, compared to the rest, it was watchable. It had some story. It had developing and changing character. Some characters were plain turn off, but still as a whole, the series left a marginally positive impression.

Original series have turned me off with the typical 60s machoismo.

TNG turned me off by the numerous episodes which had more elements in common with a soap opera or reality show than with a space saga.

I have expected an action or saga-like narrative, but all Star Trek has is a mild drama.

So a bald lady and a guys with face painted yellow are likable to you?

To me, at the very least, in the Voyager the lady captain had hairs. Hairs are huge IRL.

Babylon 5 has managed to avoid the soapness by having a story.

Or Stargate and Firefly - by having the episodes explore and develop the environment around the characters.

Every episode brought something new to the table.

Data is probably the worst character of them all. He is just a "plot tool", the lowest form of "plot device": it gets screwed and bent all the time to create a short lived twist of the story. Few such eps later it is just "omg this time Data is {insert plot tool}, lol really?".

The inherit problem with soap operas is that they lack development. IOW by the end of the episode the universe comes back to where it has started. Season ending "cliffhanger" episodes try to change something sometimes (and I personally not a huge fan of cliffhangers in general). But in Star Trek they fail to even do that.

Forced myself through two seasons.

Nope. No redeeming qualities.

Ditto the original.

Voyager was somewhat watchable: several non-ridiculous characters, some non-ridiculous story, less of the "holodeck" ridiculousness.

Star Trek in general is too much of a soap opera to me to be enjoyable.

Wow. That brings memories. One of the few things which helped to use the WinNT 4.0 on 16MB RAM.

Have they finally fixes the tray? It was mostly broken why in the end I had to go back to the default shell (explorer.exe) instead.

Availability of alternative shells doesn't suddenly convert back all Metro applications into native Windows applications.

All they do is replace/bring back the start menu, so you see less of the Metro. But it is still there. You still can accidentally invoke it.

When compared to the Windows' Metro, which you can only try to avoid, yes, this is definitely a feature.

That has already happened - with the Red Hat Linux 8 & 9, the predecessor of Fedora.

I was there and the results were not pretty. I mean: it looked very very pretty, but the rest of it was turning ugly very often.

Red Hat is too much of a mindless corporation to deliver any innovation. (On desktop one needs to tell users what to do - RH fails at that. Mindlessness works on server side, because there customers are engineers and can tell you what they need.)

Canonical's problem is that they overplay a visionary. That obviously hurts ego of way too many F/LOSS developers. Thus the bitterness. The thing many miss when criticizing Canonical's decisions is that they are pretty small company with very limited resources: they simply do not have the weigh to skew the whole Linux landscape. It is IMO miracle that they have managed to get as far they have got.

The same load of BS is repeated over and over again. That doesn't make it true.

Unlike Metro:

1. Unity actually provides some benefits. Like for example full screen zoom on smaller laptop screens.

2. It breaks much less of UI conventions.

3. You can actually replace Unity with something else within minutes. (Or you can even install the Ubuntu edition without it.)

First two are also applicable to GNOME3 v. Unity comparison.

Yeah. Ubuntu is going to be replaced by Mint. Oh wait, Mint *is* an Ubuntu-based distro.

Part of why Linux (IMO) succeeded was the duplication.

Because if you carefully evaluate the duplication, lots of it is not really duplication - but it is the choices, we are free to make.

Take away the "duplication" and you end up with something close-minded as Java, Windows or Mac OS.

The only "negative" of the duplication I have seen so far is the hurt ego of the competing developers.

The consistency was achieved not because we have single implementation - but because everybody has agreed what should be inside the implementation! Without previous duplication, without seeing the flipside of different design choices, reaching agreement wouldn't have been possible!

I work for commercial ISV. Believe me when I'm saying you from a decade of practical experience that "no duplication" doesn't mean "consistency" or "ease of development". Very very often decisions are rushed for marketing reasons and developers are stuck for years with a "committee design" nobody can change because nobody knows alternatives because we do not allow duplication.

Only the "look".

It is possible to make Firefox NNN to look like Fx 1/2/3, but in many places the *behavior* is hardcoded and impossible to change. E.g. activities vs. separate downloads/bookmarks/etc. Status bar add-on is also rather buggy, compared to its native counterpart of earlier Firefoxes. Ditto newer versions of the location bar.

Look - yes. Behavior - no.

Probably that was the problem?

If you have an nVidia card, for past 5+ years installation of the proprietary driver was a matter of a single click and a reboot. And that single click in a settings window called "Additional Drivers". Hard to miss if you trying to figure it out on your own.

Haven't tried ATI cards in recent years, but I'm pretty sure Ubuntu/derivatives does something about them too.

There were problems in the past with the very very recent nVidia cards, but they are updating drivers fairly quickly. (Though still slower than for Windows.)

Native vs. interpreted vs. JITed discussion is a moot. (They are all fast enough. On one side. On the other side, many code generators/translators add enough cruft for the code to often lose performance compared to the JITed/interpreted execution.)

The problem is with the libraries required by the run-time. One can compile Java application into a native app (using GCJ), but it is of little use since you still need the Java run-time. IOW, you are still poised to run into run-time deployment issues (version conflicts, local configuration, paths, etc).

Compilation to native code has value only if it allows you to create an application which doesn't have external dependencies or the external dependencies are very easy to manage.

Carpooling typically covers only the city itself.

If you live in the city - then you normally take the mass transit.

If you live outside the city, then you pick up your carpooling friends outside the city.

What you describe (exaggerating a lot though) sound very much like the "drama queen" archetype.

Ironically, in workplace, all the drama queens I have met were male.