i share your pain - these days if you ever google for a linux issue all that comes back are ubuntu forums where in the majority of cases there are questions without answers, or there are just plain incorrect answers.

and there's too much of this "don't fix it upstream, just install it from this unofficial ppa instead" going on. in the fedora/debian communities things get fixed.

ubuntu has dumbed down linux to the level of macosx/windows, and linux has suffered for it.

Or at least buy a second drive to put in the CD-ROM bay (assuming you have BIOS access). But really it is taking the piss using a work laptop for watching pr0n.

flash is no faster than an html5 player because i have to turn off video acceleration in flash anyway as its so buggy - from turning skintones blue to crackling audio to just crashing the browser.

vdpau in smplayer works fine thanks.

from what i've heard you're shit out of luck with anything hd if you're talking mpeg2 or xvid; which kills my dvb-s dream :-(

not calibre's fault. and it converts textual pdf's just fine, just don't throw too many images etc. at it, which would be crap on a kindle anyway.

Last time I looked at the code it was just things like busybox.tar.gz and kernel.tar.gz, just to comply with the GPL. You can download all that lot from Sourceforge FFS.

Its not like you can actually compile you own Kindle OS from what they're distributing, there's no Makefile or documentation on how all the bits glue together.

Its certainly not like Android where you can compile your own phone OS (if you have the proprietary blobs for gfx/gps etc.)

I wonder how much development time has been wasted saving you 12 seconds per month?

Development time that could have been used fixing Gnome3, PulseAudio, Systemd......

Wow one guy is responsible for the three worst things to happen to Linux in the last few years and he's still doing interviews?

I bet he's working on Gnome3 too isn't he?!

You know where this came from? All those people who have Google as their homepage and don't even use the URL bar.

I know competent computer users who type website addresses into google and then click the top search result. At the other extreme I know non-savvy's who have no idea what the URL bar is for or that its even somewhere to type.

The same thing happened to the bookmarks toolbar - it was the coolest thing to happen to Firefox (2?) and in 4 they hide it by default!