Nah, it's more a case of self-advertising as harder to use and less welcoming than the reality. A binary package is perfectly usable, it just doesn't have the benefits of customization. But those customizations through source code? You can actually manage quite a lot without understanding C. If editing a few string constants or following clear instructions about how to apply patches is too hard ... well, it's not for everyone and at least the suckless devs are upfront about that (better than getting a surprise "Won't Fix" from devs claiming to care about a wide audience).

I'm perfectly happy with dwm's lack of desktop icon support. Zero for me too.

Actually, you're probably best off dumping your data to text and then running gnuplot (or whatever plotting tool you prefer) separately. Octave has problems submiting to gnuplot that simply don't pop up when I use gnuplot directly or through a perl script (e.g. finding fonts when exporting to png which is what prompted me to try separating out plotting in the first place).

And this is a real problem ... how exactly? Using MATLAB for courses consisted almost entirely of writing scripts and typing a few commands into the prompt. (I presume that we did something involving the GUI at some point but it evidently wasn't memorable.) The only real benefit I gained from MATLAB having a GUI was that they implemented a better terminal than I'd expect to find otherwise on the uni's windows machines. I don't bother installing an octave GUI because it makes about as much sense as installing a GUI for ksh.

Konqueror has run flash (and more generally nsplugins) in a separate process since before Chrome was even a rumour. I used to run Konqueror as my primary browser and when I stopped using it I was surprised to discover that other browsers didn't run flash as a separate process.

dwm had its multihead support improved back in July. Since pretty much all of dwm's window management is by keyboard, of course it has keyboard shortcuts for moving windows between monitors. So yeah, this feature exists in even one of the most minimalist window managers out there.

So you're saying that Chrome doesn't support connecting through an http proxy? So long as it can connect to Privoxy you can add adblocking to a browser.

Privoxy works just fine for me. I rather prefer having a browser-independent ad blocking solution. It's one less feature to worry about when 'shopping' around for browsers and as someone who uses more than one browser it means only having to manage one filter list, not two or four or whatever.

Or you can stick APT::Get::force-yes "true" into apt.conf. Granted it's a reckless approach, but stupid technicalities are a pedant's wages.

$ sudo aptitude install w3m-img
Infection cured?

Or you could install privoxy. I've stopped caring about whether or not a browser has built-in (or plug-in) ad blocking since I'd rather have every browser I use share the same blocker and settings.

Depends on the source. Knowing what I was looking for, I was able to find a listing of the whole conjugation table on wiktionary (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/adamo#Latin) and another site that used the standard 4 forms for listing a latin verb (http://www.latin-dictionary.net/info/word/728.html).

After playing around a bit with your translator, it looks like it translates any first person present latin verb into the english infinitive. So the confusion is coming from a bad translation convention.

Wrong part of the word. It's not the addition of the ad- prefix that people are complaining about. That's rather clearly modifying the meaning in a sensible way. The issue is that with the suffix -o, the verb is in the first person present indicative whereas they're translating it as the infinitive (which would have the -are suffix).

Funny, I use aptitude all the time and yet only ever enter the gui by accident when I completely forget that aptitude has one. It's still a frontend to apt, but it's certainly not exclusively a GUI one.

I have the good fortune of being able to recognize "apt" as an (english) adjective which roughly means "suitable". So far so good: "apt" might be an attempt to describe quality rather than function. But hm, maybe it's an acronym. The "p" might be for "program" but in this case I'm coming in with enough knowledge to realize that I'm installing "packages" rather than programs. "a" for "advanced" because it's a pretty good buzz word. "t"? Nope, stumped, so let's just look it up ... "Advanced Packaging Tool". Huh, 2/3 guessed for how to get from "something that installs programs" to "apt".

Sure, I would never guess on my own that the installer was called "apt", but being able to recognize an adjective when I see one was enough for me to avoid confusion.

And there's a very simple, already implemented way to work around any confusion coming from this hyphenation problem. People could simply stop telling new users to type in "apt-get install" and instead use "aptitude install". As a bonus, you don't have to use two different base commands for installing and searching since "apt-cache search" becomes "aptitude search".

Yes, this still leaves the "what does a word that means 'skill' or 'talent' have to do with installing programs" issue (oh, haha, the program has a 'talent' for installing programs). But giving things arbitrary-but-sometimes-maybe-sorta-related names applies as much to dogs (going back to the previous comparison). Or taking a well-known program: do people really wonder what 'firefox' has to do with the internet? Seems to me that the understanding is as simple as "there's this program that happens to be called firefox that you can use for browsing the internet".

Because during a freeze the updates to testing (i.e. the fixes to remaining RC bugs) still go into unstable first. Updates to unstable could make staging updates to testing a mess if the version gap between packages in unstable and testing became large.