Apple choosed their resolution based on backward compability, so old apps still loked good by scaling 1 pixel to 2x2. A truly resolution independent display can scale any content to any size and still looking great. I'm not sure Apples Retina is enough for that, Apple themselves indicates it's not by choosing the resolution they did.

Either you do a window-based DE or an application based, Gnome 3 went for application based. I happen to like it, a lot. this includes alt-tab behavior. If you happen do not like application based, then you should probably not try to turn Gnome 3 into one, there are other choices for you.

I think Gnome 3 is the best thing that happened to the *nix desktop for a long time. The navigation is fast if you know how to use it. I do use a few extensions, like static workspaces (altough I think this is included in 3.4). It also happen to be quite fast, running it on my ion2 netbook, no problem. Have never used a composition desktop before, they where all to slow. Gnome 3 changed that.

Gnome developers have always had cojones and done things which may not look to be the right thing, in the end they come out winning, this time should not be an exception.

It is obviously a security feature to have trusted sources for your programs, there is nothing new to this, Linux have used this for the last 15 years and I can't believe Linux was the first. You have to understand that Unix was created like 40 years ago, and there is nothing technically secure about it in todays world. This is the same for Linux, BSD, OSX, Android and IOS. Most security is bolted upon it but the fact is that it probably can't be totaly secured, it's not designed that way. Compare with a web browser or Java/Flash/NaCL which is secure by design. Yes, they have security holes but they can be fixed. Unix is "fixed" by having trusted sources, that's not a technical solution. The problem with Apples stance on this subject is that there source is the only source on the IOS platform, and they happen to use it for a lot more than security, like keeping the competition out. Yes, I know *nix isn't really secure, but I still want to be able to run certain programs (this is more important to me than outmost security), and I wan't to use a platform where competition is fair.

Broadband taxation? if you pay 50$ a month you can download whaterver you want, no strings attached. We pay for (although very cheap) anonymization services today to use the internet as we see fit, so there are actually people making money from copying. I would gladly pay tenfold to get out of the relative clusterfuck that is Piratebay today. Let's face it, PB is no Netflix in terms of usability. But the content industry isn't interested, they still want 25$ per movie using DRM which takes hours to circumvent if you need play them on anything not sanctioned by them, while PB is offering movies in formats people actually can play. The industry is protecting what your parent said an "outdated bussiness model". They need to change, their former and hopefully future customers already have.

Best way to defeat this would be to stop the sensors (for background apps) when the keyboard is up. But really, if you got some nasty trojan on there you got problems anyway, and password stealing by reading sensors is probably not the worst of them.

Nvidia Ion2 does HD Audio (all supported BR formats), I'm running a Asus S1-AT5NM10E. It's cheap and only missing harddrive and memory. XBMC Linux does not yet do HD audio but standard mplayer does. I'm streaming full BR rips over NFS and it's smooth. I'm running XBMC for now, and if I want the full experience I just start the movie with mplayer.

I have tried some media streamers in the past altough not the Popcorn Hour, my problem have been with scale, the one I've tried didn't do a collection of thousands movies too well.

Those programs work the way they do becuase X11 is what it is. If there where no network transparancy the installer would probably be comandline. Likewise diagnosicsprograms would probably be better by using a simple webserver and serve to your browser. No change comes with zero flaws, but in the end X11 network transparency is used only by a few (I have definitely used it also for these examples so I know whar you are saying). But I can live without it, and X isn't really going away in 5 minutes anyway, there will be time to adapt. Most of the time even VNC would be adequate today. Also remember that Wayland is made to make desktop Linux/Unix better, the examples I hear about why X11 and it's network transparency are great are always about the server.

There are hundreds of things in these games which are not compatible with the book of lord. Killing people every minute, mystery forces and so on. Just get over it and play Hello kitty adventure instead, 100% free of gay marriage.

Speaking as a Linux user, there has always been problems with third party programs in Linux, nonstandard installers, manual updating and so on. I, and I'm probably not the only one very seldom install third party software in my operating system (something not in the distro). I know if I use the distro supplied packages the system will work, like forever. I've seen (and used) Windows installes which have crawled to an halt in a year, mac likewise (although some would say this can't be). I've never seen a Linux install just getting sluggier as time moves on. I do believe this is because we use mostly distro supplied programs. Breaking this barrier is hard and probably one of the reasons Linux users don't like to buy programs, a normal distro have most of what we need anyways.

Now, late to the game, there has finaly come a technology which will not only offer games to Linux, but also don't screw with our operating systems. That tech is Google NaCL (I'm sort of a fanboy for NaCL if you check my history). I believe this to be the premier way to deliver games, not only to Linux (which most devs don't really care about anyway) but also to Windows and mac. Sandboxed (No possible way to screw around) is the way of the future for this type of programs. I do not want to install my games (And yes, I game in Windows), I want them playable from the net, and just trash them (could even be automatic, similiar to a web cache) when I'm through playing them. Not leaving anything behind. I have payed for a few Linux games over the years (Not enough to justify a Linux version I admit), but now I no longer want a Linux version at all, I want NaCL, it's just superior tech, for any OS.

http://qt-project.org/wiki/Qt_for_Google_Native_Client