Could Slashdot start offering free SSL support for all readers?

Blaster (and Mydoom, Sasser, Loveletter, all the classics) is from the era when vulnerabilities actually were a very serious problem with Microsoft software, including Windows, Outlook, Internet Explorer, Internet Information Server. Back then, Linux still did provide significant benefits over that junkpile. But times have changed.

Innocent until proven guilty. All I see is that the Microsoft vulnerabilities are no more in the headlines.

You could as well say that Heartbleed and Shellshock are just scraping the surface, and are an indicator that open source might have more dragons lurking.

You probably meant "interpreted" instead of "interpolated".

That could be a good compromise.

The competitors very well might do that. Going with an open development process always means handing the knife to your competitors in some extent. However, in your case, you could counter the effect with your own marketing, by boasting that you are fully committed to openness and are upfront about possible problems, unlike your sleazy competitors who swipe issues under the carpet. If you otherwise make quality software, I'm sure your customers would see value in that.

I still feel more free under Windows and Mac, as there is more software available to allow me to express the things that I want to do with my computer. There is many kinds of freedom, see?

Anyway. One feature which really hurts Linux desktop is the package management. It works really well when you want to install things just from the distro's own walled garden repositories, but it's a real pain in the ass for third parties. Often you have to target a certain distro and even a certain version of it, and very carefully make sure that all the library dependencies and things like that match. It's hard to support something like that. This is also the reason why Valve went with the "steam-runtime" library pack, to at least try to provide some kind of predictable platform.

But Android is a stable platform, unlike desktop Linux distros.

I do not see anything terribly wrong with the user experience of Unity. It is quite close to a typical Windows or Mac desktop and not a "mobile UI" like a lot of people claim.

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop compton

Can confirm, the Ubuntu GNOME remix was actually surprisingly good when I tested it a couple years ago when it was introduced. GNOME3 is also kind of a practical choice as there is a large community and good amount of developer resources behind it.

Well, I guess that avoids scaring the beginners away. But really, modern programming is often about managing hugely complex codebases with hundreds of thousands of lines of code. It's not the end of the world, and all that can be managed, but beyond writing some just-add-water toy apps, the technical complexity certainly is there.

There's a lot of comments asking does this or that count. We need to define what is actually a toy. I'd say it's an object designed solely for play, without any obvious functional uses. Comments?

Actually that's the definition of luxury.