Citation needed. According to wikipedia, Linaro was only founded 2 years ago.

This is also true in other Commonwealth countries, such as Australia, Canada, etc.

KDE is hardly an alternative desktop - it has more in common with Gnome (in terms of popularity) than XFCE.

There's a difference between premature optimization and software bloat. I can see absolutely no reason one program should take up 2+ orders of magnitude more resources than a competing product with 90% of the features.

Once upon a time there was an idea to target both phones and tablets - what happened to that? It seems like they're only concentrating on tablets now.
-someone who was really looking forward to running KDE on his phone

Here's a useful reference point: I ordered one from both element14 and RS at the same time. The RS one arrived several weeks after the one from element14. I ordered another one from element14 more recently, and it arrived in under 3 weeks.

AFAICT, most of the people complaining ordered theirs from RS. I suspect part of the reason may be that RS is using a completely separate website and therefore likely has a completely separate administrative process for fulfilling orders, which isn't as capable. Element14 just added them as items to their regular site, so they aren't subject to the same limitations. (I'd say that was a pretty good move on their part, given that I've since ordered lots of more obscure components from them.)

I have Word docs in a git repository. Diffs seem to work fine, though I haven't tried doing any merges yet.

The fact that this wasn't fixed during development is pretty telling. There are plenty of commonplace devices that simply don't work, the most notable being powered USB hubs.

Here's some perspective: I have an Android tablet which I installed Debian on. The 2.6 kernel I use on it is a modified Android kernel, and the 3.1 is a beta kernel provided by Nvidia. I am yet to find a device that works under x86 Linux that is not supported by either of these kernels. Now, I'm more than willing to say that the device is a hack, plain and simple. There are plenty of bugs, some of which are show stoppers (there's a reason I use 2 different kernels on a regular basis). Yet this franken-tablet with a small handful of people intermittently working on it has better driver support than a mature product like the Raspberry Pi with hundreds of developers. That should say something about the nature of the bugs.

It's pretty much standard at my university (in Australia) to post video lectures and slides online, and I'd say it's invaluable. The slides are great if you need to look something up or fill in something you missed during the lecture, but the videos are better if you missed the lecture entirely (you could have a clash, been ill, etc.) since the lecturer often goes into additional details and explanations beyond what's in the slides, or does a derivation in the margins.

Solution: put the button inside the case, maybe directly on the motherboard.
If you're serious about security, the case is going to be physically locked anyway.

And what if we actually like using non-x86 architectures? ARM is becoming increasingly popular - I already have 2 different ARM devices, both running Linux. It's only a matter of time until ARM makes it's way into the desktop/server market. Even now, there's a lot of interest in running Linux (proper GNU/Linux with an X server) on tablets.

You joke, but there's already a lightweight Qt-based desktop environment called Razor-QT that runs quite nicely on the RasPi, though it is still a bit rough around the edges since it's still in development.
If all else fails, the KDE project could probably assimilate it.

http://goatse.ch/

What do you mean American problem? The patent situation is a problem affecting multinational technology companies around the world. One of the key points about the whole Samsung vs Apple case was that there were different outcomes in different countries.
Also, I'm fairly certain Slashdot doesn't count as a blog, and the Americanness of it is rather questionable as well.

Pretty much any (GPL-compliant) Android phone with an unlocked bootloader can run any Linux-based OS you want. And while this company has just started, the KDE project is nearing version 2.0 of Plasma Active, which runs on top of Mer (a fork of Maemo/Meego that Jolla will almost certainly also be basing their OS on).

We already install Linux on desktops that come pre-installed with Windows - I'm surprised there aren't more people installing Mer on their Android phones.