Maybe this new GNOME is their version of Microsoft's "Windows Starter Edition" where you're only allowed to have a few things open at once, and they'll be coming out with a "GNOME 3.0 Home Premium Edition" in the near future that will allow us to actually use the D.E. like it was meant to be used?

Since the Ubuntu desktop wreckage of late I've switched to Debian. couldn't be happer. cut out Shuttleworth's meddling and go straight to the source :-)

which is why I don't run mixed repos, at least not for the past few years. Stable suits me just fine now that the fascination of testing the latest and greatest crap has worn off.

... and you can pry it from my cold, dead, hands! Wot ain't broke didn't need fixin' and now this GNOME 3 monstrosity is trying to impose its strait jacket upon us just like KDE 4. As soon as you can make GNOME 3 look and behave 99% like normal, usable, GNOME 2.3 then I'll upgrade my distro. GNOME Shell Extensions is perhaps a first step in improving what is a terrible rewrite, but it still looks too irritating for people that care not for the one-app-at-a-time netbook experience.

Compiz has its uses. Sure, I only turn on wobbly windows to impress newbies, but its window placement rules are a god-send! If only Linux apps would damn-well remember where they were last time, I wouldn't need it, but since this is utterly beyond quite a few Linux application programmers, we need such hacks. Though, specifying certain rules based on window title, etc, mean that my windows open 100% where I expect them to, every time. Going back to Windows at work is a huge pain when you're constantly having to de-overlap explorer windows, for example.

Speaking as somebody who abhors DRM and the various limited digital music stores out there (with pathetic, mostly-pop rubbish catalogues), I agree with the post above your reply. Optical drives are invaluable for playing or ripping CDs, and I will never give up my CD collection and start buying these horrid music downloads from equally horrid online stores that more often than not tie you into iTunes or some other evil ecosystem (and since I use Linux, they don't work for me anyway, and if they can, courtesy of some hack, then that's unacceptable anyway).

No thank you very much! It's my CD collection for me from now until the day I die. I have about 1,400 of them so that ought to keep me busy, and yes, I have ripped most of them them but I also play them in my car and also in my kitchen stereo. There can be no substitute for owning the real thing, IMHO. All these people buying into proprietary online digital music stores will be sorry when the day comes that the store dies and your music is screwed. It has happened before, and it will happen again. And I'm not going near iTunes (since I use Linux) and because its offerings are so paltry that I laugh at its catalogue's meagre range!

What else is the NBN for other than using copious bandwidth for digital content? I sure as hell ain't gonna get a Telstra T-Box and be forced into watching movies and TV shows on their pathetic schedules, and most likely be forced to watch advertising without being able to skip through it. Or, what's worse, being forced to select from the paltry range of good TV shows from overseas and have to watch locally-produced content which is mostly rubbish. No thank you.

This government has got to go. Make no mistake!

Whilst I'm not happy with Firefox's interface changes since the good old version-3 days, I still prefer it as a browser. For one, Firebug is unbeatable when it comes to debugging web sites (especially with AJAX), but since Chrome's developer tools use a font that's so small (which you can't change), there's no way I could even consider using it. Their hatred of menus and buttons gives me the heebie jeebies, too. So, for now, I'm staying loyal to Firefox (with a view to just giving up and using Ephipahy, on Debian, when even Firefox becomes so horrible I can't use it anymore).

That video just demonstrates why I'm sticking with 2.30.2. No traditional taskbar method of switching between applications is a deal breaker. Oh, and that video seems to be 20% visits to "Help > About" windows... quite boring indeed!

For starters, they're calling it a "mash up" which is an instant reason to reach for the puke bucket. What's wrong with going to each "service" as and when you need them? Why trust some ".bomb" with all these services? You're just asking for trouble.