Do you know your device?

Do not let anything connect to the Internet if you don't know why it should.

I don't have rabies, you insensitive clod!

What does "a little too light-weight" mean? Something like JWM or icewm?**

LXDE has a useful set of features and it won't waste your time with unwanted "special effects". If you really are frustrated by the barkers at the KDE-Gnome-Mate-Cinnamon desktop carnival, I suggest that you try Debian LXDE or even Lubuntu.

The configurable simplicity of LXDE is the main reason to use it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_window_managers)

One of the main reasons why the Debian folks switched from Gnome to XFCE was that they couldn't fit Gnome on a CD anymore. The fact that the market is abandoning optical disks in favour of USB/SDHC booting doesn't mean that I want KDE/Gnome bloat.

**Disclaimer: I use icewm on my Raspberry Pi(s). The icewm DE light, simple, and easy to understand. Oh yeah, and the R.Pi won't run much else very well anyway. (o;

"Due to being in a relationship with a comics geek"

This must mean that you are a girl who enjoys basement lodging. Therefore, your post is false and was either submitted by a program that won the Turing Test or by a CIA operative.

It's 2014 and Slashdot is full of Golden-Age Comics.

For music that I want to hear in its entirety, I use cdrdao to rip an entire audio disc to a single file. I use mplayer to play the file.

Here's the howto:
https://forums.freebsd.org/vie...

mplayer is available for Windows too.

Not Ghostery -- it has a dubious mission and works by parsing lists that are growing longer by the week. Try the Request Policy extension for Firefox. Request Policy is simpler. It blocks off-site requests and shows you a list of what each site is requesting. You'll learn just how much tracking is happening and you may begin to avoid sites that you used to trust.

The latest Firefox has a "click to play" feature. Type "about:config" and search for "click_".

I prefer Linux on my desktop in every way. Just don't buy Nvidia and Broadcom hardware. Linux provides the tools that show exactly what your computer is doing. Debian 7 is excellent.

Windows 8, like ChromeOS, ties your computer to an e-mail account. Stay away.

We're in the golden age for software development. I prefer an "open" solution like the Beagleboard but I received an R.Pi v2 for free and have made it part of my low-power dev environment. I'll describe this environment for the amusement of ye 'dotters.

I installed a $10 hardware clock in the R.Pi and I power the it with a spare power cord from an Amazon Kindle.

I run Raspbian (Debian) with Icewm DE. I use the R.Pi for coding (Java, C++, Perl, Go) and I push Mercurial updates to a code repo on a Sheevaplug running Debian Wheezy. The Sheevaplug's power supply had failed (typical problem, melted capacitors) but I wired the mainboard to an AC adaptor from a USB hub.

I've overclocked the R.Pi to 900MHz. This isn't enough CPU to browse the Internet directly from the R.Pi with Iceweasel/Firefox, but Midori and NetSurf work well enough. On a Pogoplug V2 (running Debian, you see the pattern here), I have lighttpd and a Perl program that fetches and summarises RSS feeds for me. I can view the RSS summary from the R.Pi using NetSurf or Midori. (Dillo doesn't do tables well.)

When I need to do Web research that requires Flash or special plug-ins, I use rdesktop to connect to a VM instance of Firefox (M-Windows XP or Debian) installed on an AMD box running VMware ESXi server. ESXi server is free.

I have all this running with an APC battery back-up. The APC unit can run for some time with only the ARM kit to power. I have another APC UPS feeding my modem, router, and assorted switches.

It's a versatile dev environment and it didn't cost much. None of it would be possible without Linux. I'll say it again: this is a golden age for software developers.

Kardashian is working on this too?

A factoid is not a fact.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid

The only "factoid of interest" is that Slashdot may have editors.

I once had a job in the EduBubble where I had to learn SAS. It's a language could only survive in the EduBubble, which is at least 15 years behind in technology and 25 years behind in thinking.

If R isn't a well designed language, at least it is free, open source, and capable.

If this is true, then it proves once again these truisms of a military-based capitalist economy:

= Politicians serve their economic masters.

= When the rich declare war, poor kids are sent to die.

= The betrayal of the credulous happens every day.

In other breaking news, the Egyptian foreign minister just announced the completion of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Great, now I will know what the function with the following comment does:

"Gott vergib mir, das ist eine schreckliche Hack!"

For the sake of order on this sadly degenerating News for Nerds site, please add your post to this parent if the essence of your "thinking" is one of the following:

= LibreOffice is not MS Office, therefore it's crap.
= LibreOffice uses Java, which everyone know is not as fast and portable as .NET.
= LibreOffice lacks MS Office proprietary features and misfeatures, therefore it disappoints me terribly.
= LibreOffice doesn't read or write the constantly mutating, rubbish file formats of MS Office the way only MS Office can.
= LibreOffice isn't backed by a large corporation that Only Wants The Best For Me.
= LibreOffice is bloated, and I insist on the lean responsiveness and stability of MS Office!
= LibreOffice doesn't have ribbons to help me not find features that I used to use.