It's not even that... more of a kludge-fest.

Encouraging gamers to switch to Linux will severely limit their availability of games through Steam. I know that Steam's availability of Linux games should improve over time, but for right now it is but a fraction of what's available for Windows.

Murphy's *

...Sorry, couldn't help it. =)

If you consider palette swaps to be variety...

I don't understand what you mean. 8 has all of the same window management capabilities that 7 has. Unless you're talking about the Metro apps, which nobody is forced to use if they don't want to.

There are many reasons why people might choose XFCE over KDE.

You use the word "usable" pretty strongly there. Having the Metro screen replace the Start menu hardly makes the OS unusable. The full-screen change is a bit of an interruption to my train of thought, but the dozen applications I use with any frequency are pinned to the task bar anyway. It's really not the end of the world.

I've played a bit with Classic Shell, and it doesn't strike me as being clunky at all. It also has the OS boot directly in to desktop mode and has the ability to selectively disable all of the corner gestures, effectively leaving you with a lean Windows 7 desktop.

It's frighteningly heavy, too...

Well, I was getting more at the fact that Java encourages lazy habits in part because of its garbage collector. That is, just recklessly nulling out or re-referencing a pointer that may have previously referenced some gigantic data structure. That automated GC at runtime will save the day, but man, what a bad habit it is that people rely on it.

That's not to say that garbage collection is bad, especially if you're already writing in your own solutions to destroy objects. The difference is, you're consciously aware of what you're doing, and more in tune with what exactly is going on inside your computer when the code is being executed.

Your code probably could run circles around mine, but I'll only call you a sissy to your face if you call me an 'armature' to mine!

I have one of those sitting around with a gigantic 21" CRT... I wonder if it's worth anything as a collector's item...

Yeah, I'm of the opinion that a person who cannot properly use C (and understand how memory management works) has no business writing mission-critical software in any language. JVM's garbage collector is for sissies. =P

Laptop, netbook, ultrabook, etc, all the same thing if they run an OS supported by the SDK.

...just save the money and cut off his Internet access.

Many do. I did. People who go to college in their hometown aren't that uncommon.