> They still get the fewest complaints on NewEgg for much of their stuff for a reason

The reason being that nobody can keep one of them running long enough to file a complaint?

In my experience, Volvos expect you to get out of their way. Not the other way round.

I'm not sure that removing the dogs would have helped in this case.

Ah, the "both sides do it" defense. So that makes it OK, then?

Where's a "-1 Pedantic" when you need one?

Great! Thanks for the advice.

> In my mind, this comes down to whether we want a better functioning OS or an OS that adheres to the mindset that I think attracted many of us to Linux in the first place.

I'm not even convinced that it makes for a better-functioning OS. I've been a Debian user for 12 years, mostly running 'testing' distributions. When systemd first turned up, I let it run for a couple of weeks, but switched back to sysV after half of my startup daemons didn't. Tried it again a month or two later, but when it had trouble stopping Samba (and, worse, claiming that it would wait *five* *minutes* before killing the processes, I decided enough was enough, and now I'm in the process of switching all five of my Debian boxes to Gentoo. Now, granted, the testing distribution is for just that purpose -- testing -- but if I'm dealing with the kind of idiot that would claim that systemd results in faster startups, but thinks that a five-minute wait to shut down a process is acceptable, then I want no part of it.

Debian should listen to what its users want, rather than just its developers. We're not all technically ignorant.

No skycar. At all. I have enough trouble dealing with nitwits on the road in 2-D.

> Python 3 is the first break in backward compatibility this century!

Yep. And why is that not backward compatible too? Why don't they aim to get it right the first time? And if they don't get it right, why change it when that breaks previous uses?
I'd also remind you that we're not very far into this century yet. If that was supposed to be sarcasm, it fell short.

> Python 2.x up to 2.9 is and will be backwardly compatible with python 1.6

Then how come my Debian system needed 2.6, 2.7 _and_ 2.8 all installed at one point? Why do Pythin apps and libraries keep breaking because somebody introduced a subtle change somewhere?

Whatever Python is, it's not very robust.

I still say it's the new shiny-shiny. Nothing more.

Uh-huh. And when the Python people learn something about backward compatibility and make up their minds (so we all don't have to keep half-a-dozen different versions of it lying around), then it might actually get somewhere. Until then, it's just the new shiny-shiny.