This seems like a hugely convoluted and stupid way to manage something that wasn't even a problem to begin with. Microsoft is using the name of security to implement stuff that makes booting non-MS OS'es harder, and I doubt the primary reason truly is security. How many boot-level/BIOS-level viruses have actually become a major problem? Not many, and very few people were ever affected by them. I've been running my Windows 7 PC for two years now with no active virus protection (have MSE but disabled all real-time and background stuff as I find it slows down my PC). I occasionally run scans and have not once had a single issue. I feel that security is a way overblown issue that isn't really a huge deal at all. I also disabled Windows Firewall and other supposed "anti malware" "features" such as that idiotic pop-up complaining that you tried to do administrative tasks and wants your permission to do what you asked (whose bright idea was that?).

BIOS does it right, you turn on the machine, no time is wasted computing pointless cryptography, and the OS boots up. UEFI seems like a pointlessly complicated system that provides an unnecessary level of complication, lag, annoyance, and least importantly, security.

Also, why non-ARM systems? I will not buy any ARM system that doesn't allow me to run Linux and modify the bootloader, but then again I see Win8 tablets as a big pile of failure waiting to happen. I personally love Android's tablet interface and don't see it dying off any time soon.

Looks promising, I managed to compile the userspace driver and attempt loading it, it fails to load DRM though. Found out that DRM wasn't enabled in my kernel, so hopefully I can recompile my kernel to work correctly.

Awesome! I really need to find time to work on TouchPad Ubuntu again! If this works, it will make Ubuntu a ton more useful!

Both MATE (fork of GNOME 2 retaining everything you know and love from 2.x) and Cinnamon (Linux Mint's fork of GNOME 3 aiming to bring a more traditional interface with the same powerful backend) work perfectly on Ubuntu 11.10 and I'm assuming also 12.04. I ditched 11.10 for Debian when it first released as I detest Unity with a fiery passion and don't think much more of the atrocity that the GNOME developers have unleashed either. However, Debian (testing) soon switched to GNOME 3 as well and I was back at square one.

After jumping distros a few times I ended up back at Ubuntu 11.10, but have customized it by installing MATE and Cinnamon. I prefer to use some of the MATE (old GNOME) versions of the utilities (such as Caja, the old Nautilus before it screwed up half its features for no apparent reason) but love the new Cinnamon interface. If Ubuntu would release a Cinnamon version I would switch in a heartbeat.

I also don't care much for the software center, it is kind of straying away from the Debian core more than I would like, so I remove it and reinstall aptitude and synaptic. I like them much better. Once you configure it, 11.10 is a very nice distro. It's a shame the default install has turned into what it has though.

Funny seeing this coming from Qualcomm. I've been working on the HP TouchPad Ubuntu port and would love to see open-source Adreno 220 drivers with X support, but none appear to exist. I can't take them seriously on asking other companies to kill proprietary drivers when their own drivers are closed and unavailable (even TI's SGX drivers are available as a binary package with SDK and installation instructions for your kernel).

OR you simply release any changes you've made to a particular GPL project and you're in the clear. That's the point of GPL, if you're going to make changes then the community must be able to benefit from your changes. The whole point of GPL is that large corporations love to take and not give back. If a corporation wants to use GPL code then any of those changes you make must be released and made available, it keeps corporations from locking the community out. If you don't like it, you're free to rewrite whatever project you want so that you can keep it locked down. Don't blame the license, blame your company's legal policies for not allowing developers to release their changes as required by the license.

None of the other DE's that are "still in Ubuntu" are quite as good as GNOME 2 ever was, at least that's my opinion. GNOME 3's fallback mode is close, but it manages to kludge all the system applets into random categories including "System", "Applications", and the most unorganized of all, "Other". Other options are put in the new System Settings menu. It's unorganized and lacks uniformity. The menu bar uses an annoying alt-click context menu system. It lacks most of the applets I used in GNOME 2 (system monitor, CPU frequency, etc).

A closer choice is XFCE, which I did use for a while. It supported Compiz well, but still wasn't quite as nice as GNOME 2. MATE (a proper GNOME 2 fork) can be added but is still in development and has some pretty big bugs last I checked, some theme related and some Compiz incompatibilities. Finally, we have Cinnamon which is fairly mature on Ubuntu and available through an easy-to-install PPA. It isn't quite perfectly customizable yet, but it is showing that we still have a viable option for a classic desktop interface with extensions and applets.

I get why people are upset with Ubuntu (Unity is abhorrent, it is a disaster and Ubuntu's forcing it upon its users was uncalled for) but the fact remains that you're in no way restricted to Unity on Ubuntu. I got mad and switched to Linux Mint Debian Edition after Ubuntu 11.10's release. I soon discovered that Mint's quirks were annoying and that I didn't like what I saw. The ugly hideous Linux Mint Google page was the big one, after searching for hours and hacking through system files I finally undid their changes, but every time the packages updated the changes would be undone. There wasn't much help for this on LMDE, and the packages were a little different from stock Mint. I gave up and went to straight-up Debian Testing which is what LMDE was based on. That went well until I discovered that things I used in Ubuntu weren't supported. First, I do some work with ROS (Robot Operating System) which was Ubuntu-only and I couldn't download their Debian version due to a bug (that remains to this day in Debian and Ubuntu). I had issues with getting some embedded compilers as well. To top it all off, the GNOME 3 switch over ruined my desktop even worse than Unity did. Upon searching for refuge back to a usable GUI, the majority of my findings were directed at Ubuntu. In the end, I've reinstalled 11.10 and now happily run Cinnamon via the nightly PPA. I want to get MATE running as well, but it still has some issues with certain Ubuntu themes.

Try the latest Aurora build for Android, it seems that they have redesigned the Firefox Mobile UI significantly and it is much improved over the current stable and beta builds. It actually seems smooth and functional now, while the previous version likes to crash and lag. Dolphin HD works well because they don't actually implement their own rendering engine. I'm pretty sure they are just using the built-in Android WebKit engine and adding their own controls to it. Not to say it isn't a good browser, but Mobile Firefox is trying to take on a much larger task.

Cinnamon's menu is more like the Start menu on Windows 7 than anything else. While you can type the application name into the search bar, it also has all of the existing categories listed graphically and is quite easy to browse. You need to actually try it before making such claims, because it does indeed have a good graphical menu. I think Cinnamon is my favorite of the new desktops, but it definitely needs some work before it's truly ready (should be able to move/rearrange applets and items on the menu bar, move the menu bars to different locations, right click anywhere on bar to add items, etc).