I recall a few years back that they had a LTS release with a beta version of Firefox that was broken, broken Pulse Audio, and even worse, a bad binary blob in the Intel gigabit NIC drivers that would permanently brick your NIC if you loaded the driver.

LTS releases are supported longer, but that doesn't make them more stable on day one. Nor does it change the fact that the packages get the same polish the other fairly bleeding edge Ubuntu releases get.

Red Hat and Debian Stable seem to be overly cautious with sticking with old packages forever for "stability", even if known bugs exist in old packages. Ubuntu is very bleeding edge sometimes at the cost of stability.

I think there needs to be a fairly sane middle ground where each package gets reasonable polish, but you also get newer packages out somewhat quickly. But that takes a lot of package maintainers.

I haven't checked it out recently, but Ubuntu doesn't necessarily have a reputation for solid bug-free packages that never crash. Ubuntu doesn't have as many engineers, developers or package maintainers as Novell or Red Hat.

Ubuntu's KDE packages were so famously awful that it soured a lot of people who assumed KDE must be buggy and unstable on its own (when openSUSE and Fedora KDE packages are rock solid).

FWIW, I don't think Unity has done much to improve the desktop experience, though that is somewhat a matter of taste.

Canonical marketed Linux to the extent that Ubuntu was tracking higher as a keyword in searches than Linux.

I'd like to thank the KDE devs however for making Linux usable on the desktop.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyOTq1EpV5o

Fun times

> Ah, the chutzpa of the American winger. Call bullshit, then spout off a bunch of nonsense that's nothing but bullshit.

Ad hominem attacks. I'm not a right winger. I'm a Libertarian.

> Bullshit. If that were the case, you'd be rattling off how this single payer country doesn't cover cancer treatments, and that one doesn't cover organ transplants. You don't because you can't.

You'll note that in Canada and Mexico people are opting for private insurance precisely because the government run single-payer system is frequently not covering these costs.

> Bullshit. They only have to get you healthy long enough to get out the door. And their bill collectors will hound you as long as they are legally allowed to and quite possibly past that as well.

They save your life and then you go bankrupt, precisely as I said. You're the one who is lying. And they don't harass you forever. Once you declare bankruptcy, the bill is absolved. And we have legislation precisely for this. Part of the cost of health care in this country is the hospitals getting tax writeoffs for these unpaid bills, which is why hospitals list bullshit, artificial costs for their services. Ibuprofen doesn't cost $200, but it is listed that way on a hospital bill to pad their tax write offs.

> Which Democrats are those? Certainly not the ones in the White House or in Congress, since they are the right wingers who first killed the possibility of single payer, then traded away the public option to the hospital lobby, and finally passed the Heritage Foundation plan/Romneycare.

You mean like the President, who repeatedly said he wants a single-payer system. What he describes exists in Canada and Mexico, where only the rich get the best care.

Military spending is 650 billion dollars, not 1.5 trillion dollars. It helps if you don't lie.

Current Medicare/Medicaid spending is 752 billion dollars.

Someone honesty tried telling me this week it would only cost 2 billion to give free healthcare to every American that covered everything, and that it was a tiny drop compared to military spending. I put in capitals because I think most people honestly don't realize that private health care is over 2 trillion. Add that to our existing 752 billion dollars and you end up with 3 trillion annually for health care. Adding an additional 2 trillion in debt every year would literally destroy the fucking country.

I read it first hand while visiting relatives in Edmonton. The government was laying off doctors and nurses 4 years ago despite a surplus in the province from oil.

That is nothing short of a lie. As it stands today, federal law requires life saving care for everyone whether they can pay for it or not. And people say the system is "let poor people die on the street".

Yet they're asking to emulate countries where that does happen, such as Mexico. It has single-payer universal health care and it is absolutely terrible, and they routinely turn people away for no good reason. The only decent health care in the country is for private rich hospitals that the poor have zero access to in Mexico.

Do you really want that system?

That's bull shit. What they want is a system like Canada and Mexico where it is a single player system. And free government health care ends up not covering many expensive treatments, so only the rich get care.

In the United States, federal law requires hospitals to provide everyone life saving care whether or not you can afford it.

So what Democrats are pushing for would lead to only the rich getting care. Our current system is fucked up and can use reform, but worst case scenario is a bankruptcy, but your life is saved. I'll take that over dying.

Like England, which can't afford it?

Like France which is arguing can't afford to cover immigrants?

Like Canada where the government is laying off doctors and nurses and people are starting to get private insurance because the government isn't covering everything?

Like Mexico where single-payer health care is truly awful and the only real health care is for the rich?

Like Greece where the country is bankrupt?

Like Iceland where the country is bankrupt?

The health care you receive in these countries is not the same as what Americans expect today. Americans wouldn't put up with lottery systems or lengthy waiting lists for life saving surgery. Heck, in the United States we have prescription drugs for getting thicker eyelashes.

There is a reason why people travel from all over the world come here for the best care. And we're already spending $732 billion a year on government programs for free health care (not counting the $75 billion a year we're adding in unfunded additional costs from the ACA).

Private health care in the United States is over 2 TRILLION DOLLARS annually. When people suggest the US can simply must make all health care free because someone else does, it is ill informed, ridiculous and irresponsible. The additional 2 TRILLION DOLLARS doesn't just magically appear out of thin blue air because you wish it to.

Licensing the Unreal engine means Linux ports are less likely, and the game is much more expensive.

For what they're trying to do, why not go Unity like so many other Kickstarter games?

I think it has more to do with the fact that ATI/AMD locked up the console market for the next gen with Wii U, XBox One and PS4 contracts. Nvidia had to find a new market to shift to, which meant Android devices and Steam boxes. Both meant improving Linux Nvidia drivers.

Why would embedded manufacturers prefer buying a GPU from someone who isn't established over the usual players? I don't think they care about having a 100% open source GPU driver.

I applaud this in principle, I just don't think there is a massive audience for this project, especially with Nvidia's recent mea culpa to the Linux community and their new promise to help deliver solid open source drivers for their cards. Given that Nvidia wants to be the heart of every Steam box (as well as every Android gaming device) there may be some truth to Nvidia loving Linux now.

Do you know why touch is ultimately bad for desktops? Because it isn't very precise. And now they want to add a system that is even less precise.

This looks cool, but once the wow factor wears off, will anyone want to use this interface for any length of time?

Eve Online shipped a Wine wrapper for their Mac and Linux "ports" back in the day. They just shipped a compiled Wine (with the LGPL license and source) and a script that called Wine calling Eve Online's client.