I still use Unity, it is strangely good after you used it for a while, despite some minor bugs here and there. Unity actually included many useful features from other desktops, such as:
- Menu on top, titlebar on top (when full screen): Saving precious vertical space, esp. useful with my 1366x768 laptop screen. And to be honest, I only care about the menu of the program I am focused on anyway, so one menu at a time isn't a big problem.
- Taskbar on the left, with grouping: same as above, with 16:9 screen I can spare some horizontal space for it. Also you can quickly switch windows with Super + F[1234], something taken from Microsoft Windows 7, it is more useful and faster than Alt-tabbing because you don't have to wait for the list of windows to appear, you always know which keys to press.
- Windows grouping, subgroup switching with Alt+grave (`). Taken from GNOME Shell, help unclutter my windows list, and switching is faster too. I loved this feature of GNOME Shell, too bad it removed the windows list (taskbar) so I can't have an overall view of which windows are on the screen. Same goes for notification area, GNOME Shell removed that part and go for a touch-oriented notification system (tap bottom right for the notification list), which is extremely useless since the notification area (or systray, as in windows) is supposed to always stay on screen so you can have a quick glance.
- Topbar widget/notification is more refined than GNOME Shell, with the later on you have to write an extension in javascript with little to no documentation. With unity you can write one in python, easy.
- Last but not least, Compiz is still better than metacity/GNOME Shell in CPU/RAM usage. With GNOME Shell you are practically running an webkit browser with all the javascript jazz and stuff. So while Compiz/Unity only eats ~90 MB RAM, metacity/GNOME Shell eats about 250 MB. Sure, RAM is fairly cheap these days but that doesn't mean your desktop has to use as much RAM as the sum of the rest of your programs.

Linux Mint with MATE or Cinnamon is okay too. But MATE is just GNOME 2 renamed, it works, but no better than GNOME 2, and with a bunch of leftovers tech such as libbonobo. Cinnamon is, well, nothing special, nothing attractive for me to use, that is it. And I have heard that Cinnamon devs have many problem following upstream too.

Because the head is where they feces are.

I agree, while Canonical has paved the way for linux on desktop and they have some really good ideas (HUD for example), their solution is often quite bad, technical wise. When they introduced new notification system (ubuntu 9.04? can't really remember), I remember the notification applet for ibus (written in python) eats up to 1 GB of RAM after awhile. And Unity has its fair share of problems too.
But hey, it's open source, we are free to join and fix the code and let Canonical deal with the UX problem.

Ditto.
I removed all 'social' related stuff in my google account. While it is unlikely to be able to change the decision, at least Google won't get my information anymore. Now to find a good email service...

It seems that ChromeOS is based on hardened gentoo (clues can be found here https://sites.google.com/site/chromeoswikisite/home/what-s-new-in-dev-and-beta/shell-acess-with-verified-boot), and hardened gentoo is.... hard (grsec + pax + some kind of MAC mechanism). And while I agree that ChromeOS is very basic, just a browser on top of it. But all other browsers were successfully attacked, it means that the OS has protected the browser.

MD5 isn't that secure, and AFAIK SHA1 usage is not recommended due to near future threats too. The system you referred to is just the same one as my laptop, with the TPM chip as the 'highly protected host'.

I concur, now if only they improve the document for developing using JS with gnome-shell a bit more...

What about Comodo's Defender? You can set it up to automatically sandbox any suspicious programs (unsigned for example) and any suspicious behaviours will be denied and reported. Certainly it is not a silver bullet but I have had good experience with it after it detected a malware hidden in my input method program (which wasn't detected by MSE). The developer site was breached and a modified version was uploaded, comodo alerts me that the program was trying to access the internet.

Although I haven't read tor document in depth, I think blocking certain tor hidden services is doable. A tor node with hidden service will 'advertise' it services on randomly chosen nodes (introductions point), those who want to connect to the hidden service choose one random node (rendezvous point), ask those introductions point to relay the message to the hidden service node, which will initiate the connection by connecting to the chosen rendezvous point (extra step of redirection, I know). So if a node owner want to block a hidden services, he only need to blacklist that .onion domain, forbidding it from being advertised on his node.

Pretty good, it is even more stable than Fedora, rarely do things break, and even if they do there will be announcement on how to prevent/fix it. Still, setting up my own DE is a pain, for example I still can't do tethering with my Android phone without some magical configuration.

While it is certainly possible for some cases, IMO the programmer should rather know and change their design to avoid it than relying on compiler optimisation.

You don't need to guess which machine code will it be turned into nor how every transistors work in your CPU while running it, but you will generally need to understand the mechanism of what you are using. For example in C++ don't call virtual method in a tight loop if you want performance, you will need to understand the idea behind virtual method to know that.

Us Asian all have small finger, that helps a bit with the typing, and there are some Android phones with qwerty keyboard too.
Regarding to speed, I agree that Symbian feels much faster, still I hate how they only includea minimal amount of RAM in their phone, my last phone (a Nokia 5230 with 128 Mb RAM, before I dropped it to death) could only open ~3 tabs with Opera Mobile before running out of memory. Nevertheless it was a good phone. But now Nokia has declared Symbian to be a burning ship, I see no reason to use it anymore. That, and with my personal hatred to Nokia for killing off Meego/Meltemi/Qt and then siding with Microsoft make that 5230 the last Nokia phone I buy.

Opera mini does the same, that is why it is so lightweight and can render (albeit sometimes incorrectly) fairly complex webpages on very weak phones, it even re-encode images to webp format to reduce file size. Amazon Silk also does that too, so it is nothing new.
Back to the topic, for the same price for a Asha 303, you could get something like a Samsung Galaxy Pocket, which has GPS and double amount of RAM. In my country (Vietnam, a 3rd world one) Android is gaining market, even at the lower end segment while Nokia is losing out rapidly. I was surprised that if someone I know has proper web-browsing capability now, then it is most likely to be an Android phone or, sigh, iPhone.

Because the driver situation isn't too good, all open source drivers only support up to OpenGL 3.0, performance is somewhat abyssmal, and the stability isn't that good. With my previous nvidia cards, I haven't had one kernel panic related to the graphic card, while with my current integrated Intel card (on my core i5) I have lost count of the time already (suspend/hibernate memory corruption problem). Binary blobs from NVIDIA/AMD aren't good either.
Nonetheless, it is very interesting to know that Valve prefer the open source driver to the closed one http://www.paranormal-entertainment.com/idr/blog/posts/2012-07-19T18%3A54%3A37Z-The_zombies_cometh/ , if so, then I hope Valve entry into Linux gaming will help improving the situation.