A driver should never need to be recompiled by anyone but someone who needs to see the code for some reason. There is no reason you can't have a common language between the drivers and the rest of the kernel. Finding a security vulnerability in the *common language* (ABI) itself should be extremely rare, and basically unheard of if the language was designed properly (that's the point of a common language, to not change), but even if you did it'd simply be a matter of depreciating or removing the old language in the new kernel with the replacement language, and requiring modified drivers for those that are affected.

If someone says that driver ABI is too low-level to create a standardized interface for it, I call BS. There's no reason one couldn't be created. Programs use standards and get along with other programs all the time, and there's no reason drivers have to be any different. I believe there isn't a bigger push for this because distro companies want programs to be locked into their distos and distro versions to encourage reliance on them. Sure, it is possible to compile, but I believe they enjoy having that artificial barrier there because it makes it MORE difficult for end-users to rely on anyone else but them.

For a community that strongly cares about standards and interoperability, this area, and the area of making cross-distro packaging solutions in general, are totally contrary to those beliefs.

Well I can understand keeping power settings all in one place. Users define their power settings inside of Gnome, so unless this configuration is placed in a standardised format somewhere so that all other programs will always know how to access it, the login manager won't have any knowledge of the user's settings which would be bad. Of course, there should be standardised ways to access ALL information and configurations on a Linux system, so I'd love for that to happen regardless.

Come back and let us know what you choose. :D

I'd consider any Linux distro that had picked up adoption of universal packaging standards. Maybe that will happen soon though? Oh please oh please oh please...

Interesting, I hadn't heard about that. I wonder if it will be fixed in that main kernel version or if it's too big of a change and will have to be fixed in .39 or something.

http://www.advogato.org/person/mjg59/diary.html?start=296

To summarise, their argument is that LightDM is light on code because it can't do as much as GDM and the others, and if you removed those features from the others they would be light as well.

If that's true and that is the main difference, maybe it'd be easier to strip out, or turn off, parts of GDM if Canonical wants to dispose of certain features to achieve a faster boot time.

11.04 is SO SLOW to boot in comparison to 10.10.

I totally agree with most or all of your points, and maybe some of those things will be addressed but I think some might be too contrary to the paradigm. I too was annoyed at the amount of work it took to open up another terminal, but for that particular problem it will or could easily be addressed as it has been addressed for Firefox. For Firefox, if you right click on the icon, you can tell it to open a new window. For Gnome Terminal, Nautilus, and other apps though there is no option in the right click menu, and instead you have to go up to their menu and tell the program to open another window which is much slower. So, I hope they make all the programs capable of having multiple windows have that right click option.

On a completely unrelated note, I think for the "system tray" that they wanted to get rid of which is normally used for apps you want to know are running, but don't want them taking up a lot of room in the window switcher, that they should do what Chrome/Firefox do for "browser apps", and give you the option to condense those long-term apps down into a single icon in the window switcher.

The panel is the launcher, and it's scrollable when it gets full so that you don't need (but still might like) another one. It's a "dock". A dock is a window switcher + app launcher rolled into one, which is what both Microsoft and Apple made default in their OSes, and now Gnome and Ubuntu. Of course, Linux has had docks long before anyone else. ;)

They exist, they just don't make chips yet, but that is being worked on. http://www.fabathome.org/ http://www.makerbot.com/ http://www.thingiverse.com/

The elderly people I've showed Gnome to had no problem navigating around in it either, it came pretty naturally and simply due to it being in general an easy GUI to work with, despite a few rough edges here and there.

Valid point, but one I'm hoping may be ignored if much of the public ends up transitioning to WebM instead.

It would be nice if applications could use a single API for Linux in general, and the program would be rendered appropriately for the DE the user happened to be in. This would destroy the whole "this app is KDE, this app is Gnome" thing. If you could just standardize the API for every service an application needed, whether it be a clip board, or a key store, or a network service, having some good standards/APIs so that apps could be shared between both DE's more would certainly help the Linux ecosystem.

I am glad that there is a lot of recycling due to apps using the same libraries and back ends though, I just wish the front ends could be recycled too.

As long as the bling doesn't steal tons of their computer's power, most users would prefer to have both bling and productivity. Something that is nice to look at and to use to get their work done at the same time. Crazy concept, I know.

Maybe they should consider using appropriate labels then for those "development releases". Maybe stick an Alpha there, a Beta here, you know, something helpful.

Regardless, I can't stand KDE4. As mentioned all over, the interface is incredibly cluttered. While I don't like Gnome for not including more easily accessible advanced options which could be simply hidden/buried one level down, until the KDE developers learn to keep things simple and bury their options hardly anyone uses, and basically actually start heeding user interface design and workflow, Gnome will have to continue to be my DE of choice.

I think you may have hit the nail on the head. I don't think it's anything like a lack of standards that is keeping there from being more open source Linux games, except good cross-distro installation standards (getting your game recognized by the software manager so you can control it, and even update it, using it), I think it's vision and organisation issues. Conveying one's vision for a game is difficult, and getting several developers to agree and want the same vision is pretty hard too. With something like FreeCiv, like you said, that vision is already very clear if you're simply trying to duplicate an existing concept. That, plus existing games that are good are great attention grabbers so those can get a lot of modders flocking around them, while you need to have a well-presented visible open source project if you want to grab attention.

Providing AMD isn't withholding critical documentation about their GPUs from open source driver developers, and they can actually bring the open source drivers up-to-par.