A Public school education is only free if you don't value your time. To put it another way, the time spent is wasted if you don't value learning.

That's what we're talking about. Migrating to Linux was difficult, painful, and time consuming for me, because I had to learn some stuff. I learned the stuff, and now it's all awesome all the time. What is the point of a computer lab if it isn't for kids to learn stuff about computers?

You generally don't need to use the command line to use linux at the desktop, but let's talk about the command line for a minute. it's my favorite example of investing in learning. People tale about the command line being hard, but it's not harder to use than the GUI. Often, it's easier to use. LOTS easier! But it's hard to learn. The thing is, learning is a one time thing. You learn something, and if it's useful, you don't have to learn it agian. The time wasted clickclickclicking through menus is ongoing.

People need to understand that "hard to use" and "hard to learn" are two different things.

And to get back to the command line for just a second, I'm not saying that the command line is better than the GUI. That's a false choice. In linux the command line is part of the Desktop. I'm saying that two tools are better than one.

...annoying his gruff, long suffering boss, Inspector Todd, with his refusal to pursue criminals "by the book".

I think you are misremembering some things, but maybe I am, too. I started with Linux ten years ago (August 2002), and most distros were already defaulting on ext3, and according to wikipedia, ext3was introduced in 2001. What I seem to remember is a move from ext3 to reiserfs by debian (unstable, it never got to stable), opensuse, and slackware, but around the time of Hans Reisers' (air quotes) "legal problems", distros started moving back to ext3, before moving to ext3. That's how I remember it.

It's about time for XFCE to become the default of a major distro. Since 4.8, it's definitely been polished enough.

Well, it's not a question of limiting yourself. Anything that will fit on a CD will also fit on a DVD. At least, that it's the way it's always worked for me with my old hardware. If I want to burn a bootable CD on a blank DVD, there's nothing to stop me.

But are they telling us the real reason? Seriously, if the Debian developers just hated Gnome 3, would they really say that in the announcement? What would be the point in that? Especially when they still intend to carry Gnome 3 as a choice, what is to be gained by offending anyone? Does anybody remember the brief moment when reiserfs had become the default filesystem for nearly every distro? When Hans Reiser was being tried for murder, distros started switching back to ext3, but I don't remember anyone saying that they were doing it because Hans Reiser was being tried for murder. There was always some technical reason.

"There may be other reasons to prefer xfce as the default as well, but that is a complex and subjective topic."

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Yeah, I agree. Gnome 3 is terrible.

According to wikipedia, it was one mayor, Thomas Menino of Boston, who later admitted that there wasn't much that he could do, and one Chicago Alderman, Joe Moreneo. I don't know what a Chicago Alderman does, but there are 50 of them.

Everybody wants to dictate, criticize is really all there is.

Not immediately. At first it was a bit of a challenge.

Why yes. As a matter of fact, I AM semi-literate. Thank you for noticing.

I've been using Linux for ten years, since August of 2002, and I don't know what the FUCK any of this means.

I've been uswing Linux for ten years, exclusively for maybe seven. I 'm not a programmer, but I'm comfortable at the command line, and I even released my own live CD, a modified version of Slax. So I'm competant, but I also have limitations. I like to keep a debian-based distro on one machine, and slackware based distro on the other, and among debian-based distros, ubuntu is the one that works, within my limitations, with my hardware. Again and again. I used to hate Ubuntu, because I had cut my teeth on Debian, and I didn't know enough to negotiate the ways in which Ubuntu was different, but as a long-time Debian fanboy, I now love Ubuntu for having the vision to bet on debian as the template for mainstream Linux success, at a time when everybody was raving about Fedora. This is what I discovered by luck, as a newbie who installed Debian Sarge, and what I'd been telling everybody. Nobody believed me because Debian still had the reputation of being for geeks. I was lucky enough to come along at the birth of the new installer for Debain. Installing Woody, the previous version, was a long ordeal, with about 50 impenetrable questions I had to bluff through. Sarge was easy to install, and it came with an automatic connection to a ridiculous amount of software, and finding and installing software (and its dependancies) was the problem for a newbie. I saw the opportunity, and so did Shuttleworth. Ubuntu proved me wrong, and then it proved me right. It's still Debian at the core, the powerful system that used to be strictly for geeks.

Yeah, sure, Scotland sucks, whatever, but if MS is reporting Holidays that are only observed in England as being observed in "The UK", that's inaccurate. Patriot's Day is only observed in Maine and Massachusetts, but if MS reports that Patriot Day is observed "in the United States", well, that's technically true, but it's not accurate.

I'm all about the Linux, and I'm not a fan of Microsoft. I haven't used Windows since XP, and it hasn't been my primary OS since Win98. But if a regularly scheduled holiday is postponed by decree, does not being informed of that count as "a mistake"? The way I see it, the entity ordering the change is responsible for informing the media, and the mistake was not considering Microsoft (or Google, apparently) part of the media. How often is a holiday temporarily postponed? I can't remember such a thing happening in the US. What we've all learned is that the information infrastructure is not equipped to handle this extraordinary case.