Is the Linux desktop user experience:
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- By the end of 2026, how useful do you think agentic/multi-agent AI systems will actually be in your daily work or personal projects? Posted on March 11th, 2026 | 40 comments
Thanks to (Score:2)
If you can use a 2012-era MacBook (Score:3)
https://imgur.com/gallery/RemHCmZ [imgur.com]
Re: If you can use a 2012-era MacBook (Score:3)
Re: If you can use a 2012-era MacBook (Score:2)
Has OSX made any significant UI improvements since 2012? What? The touchbar?
Getting better (Score:3, Interesting)
It's all unsexy stuff and it's all involved with huge headaches trying to get hardware manufacturers to see a huge potential market and give a damn in the form of interoperating APIs, free exchange of information and maybe even contributing "free" work to the open source community. Also a lot less ego and a lot fewer duplicate ways to do x. How many free music players does one OS need??
Need License Chnges for Manuf'rs eg alt Lesser GPL (Score:2)
Hardware manufacturers won't see it as an opportunity as long as they have to give away any of their code/innovations they spent a lot of money developing, in order to get it to work on Linux. Yes it's a catch 22, but the onus is on Linux/GNU since these companies already make a lot of money with their existing customers. They won't waste a lot of time on Linux development because the market return is not worth it with the viral licensing, and the Linux market won't get better unless they make it convenient
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How? What needs to be done on the Linux side to make it convenient to contribute working, open source drivers?
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Hardware manufacturers won't see it as an opportunity as long as they have to give away any of their code/innovations
What code would they have to give away? Any innovations they make they are free to implement and if it is their innovation they can license it any way they want.
They won't waste a lot of time on Linux development because the market return is not worth it with the viral licensing
"Viral licensing" is the only thing keeping others from pulling an Apple and just stealing the code wholesale to make a closed system out of it. Name one example of a positive experience (for the end user) to result from commercial interaction with a permissive license please.
The problem with the Linux desktop isn't the licensing. It's not enough
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Two of the "big three" hardware manufacturers, Intel and AMD, are already doing open source drivers. For the private end user, things look fine there.
Nvidia has apparently started, but it might take them a few years to open everything up. It certainly took years for AMD.
In terms of "clunky and reverse engineered", give me an UI that looks like Windows XP or Win7 anytime. IMHO by trying to make its UI easier for beginners, Microsoft is regressing from the point of view of the power users.
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On the whole I think that installing Linux is easier than installing Windows, and hunting everywhere for all the drivers you need. It is just that most people get it pre-installed.
What is holding back Linux is software support for the programs people actually use on their computer.
Re: Getting better (Score:2)
Drives? How many years have you been saying this? (Score:1)
Re: Getting better (Score:1)
How many music players show up when you search on google / apple / microsoft app markets ?
Re: Getting better (Score:1)
I haven't had a driver problem for years - until I decided I wanted to use DisplayLink with multiple monitors.
I really don't understand how this isn't a shipping with every distribution, it works fine, but having to recompile every time I update the kernel is a PITA
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It's the wrong question to ask. (Score:2)
We got to the point that people want to send e-mail with their C64.
Grow up. The desktop is just what it is - a desktop application. It's not magic. It's not an OS. Besides, that 'desktop' is moving to a browser-oriented environment, the more we are connected.
The Linux desktop has been fine since, well, since Windows 95. More or less. You need to seek into another direction. It's not `the desktop` that's holding Linux back from mainstream.
Re: It's the wrong question to ask. (Score:2)
There's always a few select applications only available under Windows that holds back the transition.
And when the providers of those applications are contacted they give statements like 'no market' and 'can only work under windows'.
Re: It's the wrong question to ask. (Score:2)
Linux isn't mainstream? Tell that to the phones, embedded devices, infrastructure devices, servers, and supercomputers. Linux is the most popular OS on all of them.
Re: It's the wrong question to ask. (Score:1)
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The desktop is just what it is - a desktop application. It's not magic. It's not an OS.
The desktop is the only layer of a system: drivers, kernel, processes, etc. that a user sees. It is therefore not unreasonable that a user will judge the entire system based on what the desktop presents them with and makes them do.
It seems to me that what a user requires is to open apps, move the app's window to a place and size of their choosing, maybe diddle around a little with the colours and close / minimise windowed applications as required. other than than, a user will neither see nor experience an
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That's an engineer's perspective and not that of the user community.
Re: It's the wrong question to ask. (Score:2)
The desktop is not an app its a user focused mindset. Desktop users do not want to recompile the kernel, deal with dependency hell, struggle with hardware drivers, face inconsistent workflows to navigate applications, or deal with political flame wars when asking for help. Apple understands this very well which is why they control everything through their walled garden. The product just works for the end user, and that is what a desktop should do. ChromeOS is probably the best example of a Linux desktop in
Seriously, it's worse (Score:3)
Just a few anecdotes from my ups and downs with desktop Linux.
Dolphin is a shockingly bad file manager. I have no idea how to select/manipulate multiple files. I don't even really know how to reliably select files without opening them. Now if I set it to click to select, double-click to open, it might not be so bad, except the double-click to open setting in KDE Plasma affects all sorts of things it has no business affecting. For example it affects the behaviour of the icons of System Settings panes. The "select" action is meaningless - there's no way you can manipulate a selected System Settings pane icon anyway. The only reason to select one at all is to switch to that pane.
Going back more than 15 years ago, I remember Linux file managers being fine. They worked how you expected a file manager to work, things made sense. I don't know why they felt a need to make things confusing. These days, I do all my file management on Linux from a shell because the GUI file managers are a pile of crap.
GNOME 3 is a collection of terrible UI design choices. The actual thing that pushed me over the edge was the lack of visible borders on menus. When you've got busy content in your windows, not being able to clearly see what's part of the menu and what's window content behind the menu is infuriating. Also, little things like the lack of a proper maximise widget (need to know you can double-click the title bar) make no sense. It's like they want to remove UI elements until the system becomes unusable.
Back around 2011, Japanese input worked OK on Fedora with KDE. I could enable IBus with a GUI tool, it would start automatically, and there was a single widget on the task bar for controlling the keyboard layout and input method. Somehow between then and 2015 they screwed it up. There's no longer a GUI for enabling IBus, there's no easy way to get it to start automatically, you get two widgets so keyboard layout and IME are controlled separately. They've also decided to change the recommended Japanese IME from Anthy to something I can't remember the name of, forcing you to re-learn everything. If someone asks me how to type in Japanese on Linux, I tell them to SSH in from a Windows or macOS machine and edit in vim, so the Japanese IME is running on the client side. It's less trouble than trying to do it on a Linux desktop. That's not something I can recommend to "non-technical" people, though.
There's too much that's implemented in applications. For example, there's no single font server that presents fonts to applications in a consistent way. Everything has its own instance of FreeType, sdl-ttf, or whatever, making the way they locate, select and render fonts inconsistent. It's also inefficient, as every running application needs to maintain its own list of fonts and associated metadata.
Linux makes a great server, development platform for faceless software, or OS for an "appliance" type system that runs a single application, but it's getting worse as a general-purpose desktop. There's too much inconsistency, too many simple things are unintuitive or more trouble than necessary, and things change too frequently for no good reason.
The only saving grace is that Microsoft and Apple have started catching the same disease. macOS keeps getting uglier and less usable. Windows is getting to the point where every application embeds its own widget toolkit and even its own copy of the .NET framework (called .NET Core). Ribbons make it harder to find things, and that rot has spread from Office to Explorer, and now Windows 11 removes a whole lot of useful functionality from the taskbar and other core utilities. There are now at least four kinds of configuration interfaces: the new Windows 10 style settings panes (which suck because you can only have one visible at a time), task-oriented control panels that started to appear with Windows Vista and Windows 7, Windows 95 style control panels that they seem intent on phasing out even when they're more efficient to use, and MMC style interfaces carried over from Windows NT. It's a huge mess.
All operating systems suck. This isn't the 21st century technological utopia I imagined. Can I reroll a different timeline?
Re: (Score:2)
Have you tried asking on a KDE forum or mailing list? Or, if that's too much work, consider trying a different DE, such as my favorite, Xfce. If you can't find a DE that works the way you like, you probably haven't tried.
Re: Seriously, it's worse (Score:1)
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Definitely hasn't tried.
By default you can use Ctrl or Shift or mouse-drag to select multiple files. But what OP is looking for is the KDE-wide option (NOT a Dolphin setting because it applies to other KDE things like file open dialogs) that says "select a file on single click, open on double click" (i.e. Windows style) instead of "Open a file on single click" (i.e. Mac style, which is the default for whatever reason).
The point is, YOU CAN CHANGE IT. It's under System Settings -> Workspace settings ->
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Dolphin is a shockingly bad file manager. I have no idea how to select/manipulate multiple files.
Have you tried asking on a KDE forum or mailing list?
I have to join a mailing list to find out how to select multiple files in a file manager?
(facepalm)
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I do not know what is the intended way but:
- click into area in the column for filename and in the row of the file you want to select but not on the file name - i.e. click in the empty area after the filename. You need to have the column for the file name wide enough.
- alternatively when hovering about the icon there is a green plus sign
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Ditto. They're all getting worse. :(
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All operating systems suck. This isn't the 21st century technological utopia I imagined. Can I reroll a different timeline?
Don't worry, soon you'll be able to enter The MEtaverse [fastcompany.net]. Zuckerburg doesn't know what it is, but he knows he wants to monetize it.
Re: Seriously, it's worse (Score:2, Interesting)
Blame the feminists and the transgender activists for that.
Seriously.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/... [phoronix.com]
They created the Outreach Program for Women in 2014, disregarded their responsibilities to act as stewards to the project and almost drove the Gnome Foundation into bankruptcy wasting money that was in short supply on "gender issues".
Re: Seriously, it's worse (Score:2)
More like the people that should have been budgeting for that that program didn't and costs spiraled out of control.
Re: Seriously, it's worse (Score:2)
The program never should have existed in the first place. The leadership should have been fired and sued for implementing it at all. They violated the core values of the project as defined by the mission statement and used money donated for a specific and clearly articulated purpose to further their own personal political goals. They're thieves.
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It wasn't their fault. Cancel Cutlure and Wokeism is a Psyop by Russia and China against the Western System, you know. ;)
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There are several bugzilla entries discussing single-click selection in Dolphin. To select several files in dolphin, you press Ctrl BEFORE pressing the files. To deselect, you click on empty space below, or on the blank column on the left that (if you don't have it, choose "Side Padding" column on the right click menu on the column headers).
Dolphin is shockingly good. For once, it allows you single click opening, which is not available in other OSes. It has its caveats, but since it does not exist elsewhere
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Ok, I'm going to be "that guy" in this thread.
Uhh... what? It's been an option in Windows since Windows 98.
Not built-in but there's a pretty great PowerToy for that provided by MS themselves: https://github.com/Microsoft/PowerToys [github.com]
Sorry, I don't know what this refers to.
Open File Location as it's known in Windows has been a thing since at least Windows 7.
Re: (Score:2)
Dolphin is a shockingly bad file manager. I have no idea how to select/manipulate multiple files. I don't even really know how to reliably select files without opening them. Now if I set it to click to select, double-click to open, it might not be so bad, except the double-click to open setting in KDE Plasma affects all sorts of things it has no business affecting.
I don't know how to say this without sounding snarky, but you select multiple file in the KDE Dolphin file browser as you do in the Windows file explorer and even windows file manager from pre-win95 before it. There is a setting or settings in KDE that cause a more precise mimicking of windows mouse gestures and click patterns, but that's well past selecting individual and multiple files.
YMMV (Score:2)
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I would argue KDE has gotten slightly worse over the last few years. KDE5 never really got up to KDE4 standards, and now we are already going to KDE6.
Overall Linux has gotten better though.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: YMMV (Score:2)
That's why I like FVWM2.
No bullcrap interface.
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Hear, hear!
Re: YMMV (Score:2)
I3. For the exact same reason.
Tools should be functional first, not pretty first.
It kinda hovers at a high level (Score:2)
While there are steady improvements we see things like "Firefox on Snap" which are just needless ways to break usability.
All of the above? (Score:2)
Compared to what? (Score:3)
Some distros really are getting close (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
That's part of it. Another big part is that people try one distro with one DE, and if it's not exactly what they expect (i.e., not a clone of the latest version of Windows) they denounce it as crap, and walk away without ever trying to learn how to use it, or experimenting with different distros and/or DEs. They're used to Windows with its One True Way and can't wrap their minds around the fact that Linux is all about fre
Plateaued Several Years Ago (Score:2)
Compared to the late 90s, it's much better. Compared to five years ago, there isn't much progress. There have been changes, and some things have improved while others arguably have gone backward. Overall, in the past decade, I can't point to very much in the way of significant progress. Linux is still fragmented, and the highly customizable nature of the Linux desktop environments - while I would never want to give that up - contributes to the fragmentation. It's just the nature of what Linux is and will li
Been Using Since 2007 (Score:3)
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Really? If you can't get music working on Linux Mint, you should go to their help forum and find out why. I'm using Fedora 35 and have the rpmfusion repos active and get all of the music and video I want. HTH, HAND.
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Check out unfa on YouTube to get going. Also these forums [linuxmusicians.com].
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Depends (Score:3)
I've been using Linux Mint MATE for quite a number of years now and am very happy with it. Caja is a good, bug-free file manager. Integrating with stuff like inserting USB drivers and having them auto-mount just works. Certain desktop apps like Zoom and Discord just work and integrate nicely with the notification widget etc. I'm very happy with it.
On the other hand, I've tried Cinnamon now and again and the file manager has some sort of memory leak bug or something that has existed un-fixed for quite a while. You run into it when you work with folders with lots of content or you move a lot of files. It gradually degrades in performance until it is completely unusable and you need to kill and restart the process. That's an unacceptable desktop experience to me and one of the main reasons I stick with MATE.
I agree with another poster who complained about Dolphin on KDE. I made a custom streaming device for my TV and it runs Kubuntu because of KDE's configurability. Using a USB remote control and a highly configured KDE I get a "smart tv" experience without connecting my actual smart tv (which I don't trust) directly to the Internet. And since it's just a tiny PC running Linux it can do everything that Linux can do, like plugging in an external hard drive and opening pretty much any file format, something I've had mixed results doing with various so-called smart tvs. But Dolphin leaves a lot to be desired. For all of KDE's configurability, I can seem to configure Dolphin to have the feel and behaviour that I want for this purpose.
GUI was great, until systemd (yes, I know) (Score:2)
These days, KDE and GNOME depend on systemd. However, KDE can be had without systemd support, but then all kinds of functionality isn't there (SDDM logging, turning off the computer/sleep/etc., system monitor loses an entire pane). GNOME just doesn't work with systemd.
However, if, for some reason, a version bump of systemd happens during an update, you can pretty much expect your entire system to be unresponsive (as in: it just doesn't respond to GUI user events). When sysvinit was still there, this was a n
So dull subject (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
You should have submitted a poll idea to the poll idea poll then.
There's lots of ways of provoking passionate discussions. But most poll ideas haven't invoked passionate discussions for a long time.
If you want passionate discussions use polls like--- Who's the Best President - describe why in the comments? -- list the most recent 5 along with other as choices. Or What religion is best - describe what makes it best in the comments? -- list Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Animism,
Relatively better (Score:3)
It's very slowly getting better, but Windows is getting worse so quickly that it is on the pace of being the better OS in function of just not being constantly sabotaged by bad ideas and android envy
Re: (Score:2)
Some would say that new car models get "worse" each year. "They don't make them like they used to!" No, that's true. In the 1960s, a car with 100,000 miles was already very old and about to die. Today, a typical car will last well over 200,000 miles. Today's cars crumple when they crash, a fact often noted by those who don't like the current models. But that crumpling is intentionally designed to absorb the impact of a crash and protect the lives of the drivers.
I won't say that Windows is "better" than it u
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Cars are getting worse with the advent of features that come with the vehicle but are disabled in software until you pay a tax, like many of the tesla features.
Terrible scummy practices that are made by copying the worst of the mobile phone space and games.
And Windows is on the same exact boat, with everything that "is fine to do on mobile" being bought over to the OS, such as an increasingly bigger push into the walled garden store, data selling, advertising and forced updates.
While you do get security and
Try a tiling WM (Score:3, Interesting)
MATE and Fluxbox (Score:2)
Mate and Fluxbox are staying exactly the same, which is how we like them, and very nice they are too.
Two teams who, unlike Gnome and KDE, understand not to fix things that work fine.
2 Steps Forward and 2 Steps Back (Score:1)
Some things aren't so rosy. X11 is in its twilight and Wayland is immature and not widely supported, snaps and flatpacks are a spreading dumpster fire, dual monitor support is still poor, the Japanese IME
If you have to ask... (Score:2)
If you have to ask - it's def. not getting better.
Honestly.... (Score:2)
I miss the days when Linux was an unapologetic UNIX clone and BSD wasn't as stale. If I'm going to run a big bloated *NIX desktop environment these days I'm just going to use a Mac. Fuck modern GNOME and KDE.
My typical desktop environment is just WindowMaker and a file manager. If I'm going to use X11, I'm going to use it properly and hand tune an environment I like.
Solus Budgie (Score:2)
Recently tried a couple of distros with plans to migrate away from having to adopt windows 11, and except for a couple of irritants (not being able to arrange desktop icons being primary among them), Budgie was very well put together and I could see myself moving there eventually.
The problem with linux isn't the desktop, but all those can't live without programs open source really has no good substitutions for.
Open source has come a long way in not demanding too much from users, and several core programs li
Slightly worse (Score:1)
The desktop itself, for me it peaked at GNOME 2.32 and started going downhill with 2.34 (when they began removing things in anticipation of 3).
For the apps, some are getting better, like GIMP or LibreOffice, while other get worse, like Firefox. Of course, many others are just the same, not better, not worse.
Drawing a line, I would say us a total slight degradation but at the same time the desktop is losing relevance, many activities go to mobile devices or inside a browser window, where the OS/desktop are n
It really hasn't changed at all in 20 years. (Score:1)
Linux is trending less-worse than the rest??? (Score:2)
getting better and worse (Score:2)
Compared to Windows, much better (Score:2)
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VLC is a mess - didn 't realise anyone still used it..
use something like smplayer.
https://www.smplayer.info/ [smplayer.info]
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In my experience, VLC = One Size Fits None, but you can fiddle with the acceleration settings to see if they help at all. Depends on your graphics hardware and CPU.
I realise you're on a manged laptop, so you may not have permission to install software, but the K-Lite Codec Pack + MPC-HC is all I would ever use on Windows.
As a side note, it's been my experience that acceleration and rendering of patent-encumbered video file formats is often more problematic on Linux than Windows, but obviously YMMV.
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My office neighbour is a more experienced Windows user (I haven't had Windows at home since 2002), and showed me how to download codecs from some (!) website for free. No admin rights necessary, and the standard Windows photo viewer now plays the x265 videos without issue... Still, fishy...
What is this "experience" thing you speak of? (Score:2)
I suppose there might be people who care, but I certainly don't. All I need on my linux desktop is a half-decent terminal emulator and ideally a way to manage a bunch of them with virtual desktops or the like.
I'll get back to my typing now.
Worst fragmentation (Score:1)
Linux has many great apps and tools, but they're scattered among an absurd number of collections and desktops. Sadly, Linux will remain relegated to devices that cannot begin to show its potential because the community refuses to face the truth that the general public will never accept a fragmented OS. The 'don't like something? Fork it!' mantra you hear everywhere is just a self-serving rationalization of developer ego ('Lo, a new feature-- and a distro to highlight it!) who lack the strategic intelligence
Re: Worst fragmentation (Score:2)
Late to the party again :-( (Score:1)
About the same, still not good enough. (Score:1)
Mediocre (Score:2)
Been using Slashdot, the biggest Linux advocate there is for 20 years, and after those 20 years Linux is still average - the very definition of mediocrity, decisions made by committee, Just as average as it always was, advocates feeding on each other.
Better and worse (Score:2)
Still too little work is done to bullet proof certain features, which is caused by feature complexity. We need features and a lot more, but the features need to be logical and well integrated. If I choose a feature that implies other options should be selected unless I override them. And it should save those options, as well as tell you why the options are what they are.
Products need to be better tested before release. Testing should not be up to the general public. Companies pay huge sums for beta and
its my daily driver (Score:2)
Kubuntu 22.04 Works awesome as a desktop on my Dell laptop
The only thing that I need Windows for is a very specific software application that's used for programming industrial equipment and I run that in a VM on the kubuntu host
That VM also runs flawlessly in VMware on the Linux
Other than Rockwell's Factory talk stuff and similar a very specialized industrial applications every application that I need I found as good or better Linux versions or I'm able to run them under wine
Suck it up, buttercup: desktop is dead. (Score:2)
I mean, YES, people still use desktop. But you have three real parties:
* Office workers
* Gamers
* Everyone else
And the "everyone elses" use desktop for exactly one thing: the web browser. This includes grandma, your non-gamer friends, etc. And they really don't care about the desktop experience all that much. They want to use a sensible UI, and use that to launch a browser. And then they Just Don't Care. Because on the other side of that browser is email, news, streaming, social media, cat videos, etc.
The Pros of Linux UI (Score:2)
I'm not much into KDE however I think these comments would also apply to that UI. I think the cut and paste paradigm on Linux is better than Windows or Mac. In Linux you can cut and paste without lifting your hand off the mouse, you also have an additional cut and paste buffer with the traditional keyboard ctrl-C, V operation that you can use to simplify paste operation further.
Also, as I am ambidextrous, in the past I found it possible to configure the Index (Left - RHand) button and Menu ( Right - RHa
It's fully functional and customizable (Score:1)
I don't expect Linux to get the market share of say Apple or Microsoft.
Heck 25 or so years ago installing to hardware knowledge etc.
Linux/GNU has more to offer in flexibility and control.
As a desktop it works, you can choose the style of interface you want. You are not locked into whatever companies decide for you.
I'm very proud at how far Linux has come. At every level you can do things freely as you decide.
To me that's computing.
interbahis (Score:1)
nterbahis [interbahis-giris1.com], lisans olan ve size giri yapmak için tüm seçenekleri sunan oldukça itibarl bir iletmedir
The Linux Desktop experience is fundamentally brok (Score:2)
With GPU prices reaching sane levels I decided myself to upgrading my main rig for the first time in almost a decade. I chose:
Re: The Linux Desktop experience is fundamentally (Score:2)
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And that's your mistake right there. You're supposed to use the Preview button to see how Slashdot will render your comment before you submit it. HTH, HAND.
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Ah, didn't see it because it's still only on the Desktop site. Why was I commenting on Slashdot from the Mobile site? Apparently I just have a really strong love of footguns.