Absolutely detestable. And common. This type of thing is precisely why I take great pains to avoid being tracked, online and off. Pay cash, don't use affinity cards, block all online ads, javascript, etc., and avoid doing business with companies that use these types of methods.

Ahh, I see. So it's just a performance improvement? That's excellent, of course. I was being too limited by thinking of compositing as being, basically, all that transparency stuff, which I hate. Compositing is good, but not compelling for me, though. My performance with it disabled is perfectly acceptable. Perhaps in other use cases it becomes more important.

That just makes me hate tablets. The correct design for phones, tablets, and desktops are each different. This "grand unification" idea is a terrible one from the start.

Wait, it isn't??

I'm serious in this question. I've been putting up with compositing for a while now under KDE & Win 7, and finally turned it off on both OS's. This has improved my happiness with both desktops immeasurably. I don't see what I'm missing by turning it off.

What is compositing good for besides eye candy?

Not to mention that if I wanted the Apple UI, I'd be using an Apple computer.

I hate it because it's forever getting in my way, and does absolutely nothing that is important to me (activities are not something that gives me any value. The virtual desktops are more convenient and do 100% of what I want). It's worse than a useless bit of chrome because it's intrusive.

I dislike all the corner actions for the same reason, too, but the cashew is the worst. I remember the day when I could park my mouse cursor in a corner to get it out of the way. Now, I have to pay attention to exactly where the cursor is going to and be careful not to bump my mouse.

The thing is, for being so configurable, I don't understand why we can't have an option to eliminate the cashew.

I could not disagree more with this. I've been using KDE for a lot of years, but the recent changes to it are making it increasingly painful to use. Such that I'm now shopping around for a new window manager (that's why I'm reading a Gnome post even though I've never used Gnome).

I recognize a lot of the complaints about Gnome here in the newer KDE versions. I don't know what this new DE trend is all about, why these redesigns to a clumsier and counterintuitive way of doing things is needed, or why the developers seem to be taking such a self-righteous "you're a stupid user if you don't adapt to what we want" attitude about it all. But the trend does not appear to be getting better, and I don't think KDE (or, it sounds like, Gnome) will ever return to being a DE that works for me.

I can't speak for him, but why would you assume he doesn't care? Lots of people, including myself, do care about things like that, there's no reason to think he isn't one of them. I, too, don't like being an advertisement and avoid it when at all possible.

And that's part of why I don't use Facebook.

How much are we comfortable with our machines knowing about us?

I am extremely comfortable with my machines knowing everything there is to know about me. I am absolutely not comfortable with other people's machines (be they Google's servers, my supermarkets servers, or even my friend's laptop) knowing any more about me than is absolutely necessary.

For me, the issue is communications. I trust my machines, but only insofar as I can ensure that they aren't talking to anyone else without me specifically telling them to, and what to say. It's why I don't, and won't use most third party services such as cloud services, email servers, etc. Fortunately I'm a geek as so I can run these things on my own servers and don't have to do without.

We disagree. I think that corporations present a greater threat than the government. With the government, we at least have the constitution and some sort of influence over how it behaves. Not enough, but some. With corporations we have none. And nearly everything we do is in a corporation's control at some point or another.

In the US, your choices of providers is extremely limited -- is it three nowadays? The smaller ones simply resell the service of the larger ones so they don't count. You can get another phone, sure, but when they are all behaving in the same fashion -- as they do -- then this choice is illusory.

And you do have to use AT&T. If you use the internet or telephone service of any sort, the odds are overwhelming that AT&T is handling your communication as some point in its travels, even if you aren't their direct customer.

Using tools to get around restrictions set up by the government (as in China, etc) is NOT the same thing as getting around restrictions placed on a device by the manufacture.

I think they're exactly the same thing.

I think I see where we differ. You see a difference between corporations and government. I think that they have effectively merged and there is little functional difference, except that corporations operate with far fewer safeguards. Corporations do the things that are illegal for the government, and vice versa, but they work hand in hand. The end result is the loss of liberty overall.