You thought wrong. Linux was a free software project backed by IBM so Sun Microsystem and HP's Unix and every other proprietary Unix could be put out of business, because IBM sold Big Iron.

And now we're in a much better world because stuff that ran certified Unixen (such as radar and medical equipment) moved on to fucking Windows, because they couldn't trust the no-vendor-is-responsible business motto of the likes of Mr. Torvalds and Mr. Stallman.

Because if that situation, we began to see airports shutting down, because the air traffic optimization software went bezerk, banks and financial transactions that go sunny side up these days during marketing hours, medical emergency systems that hang, and so and so forth. And now, the world's biggest asshole, that Oracle CEO dick head owns Java. Whoopee!

Mass-market Ubuntu, based on Unity ?!

Unity was the single most retarded move in Free Software. People mistakingly complain about Dash, but Dash is the piss-poor implementation of the modeless interface invented by Humanized, which was a good thing they invented (all home Windows machines run Humanized's Enso). And Qt is making C++ viable again for fast development, with its C++11 support - and the KDE guys have stuck with Qt through and through - but they just thought it better to break shit up at Ubuntu and stick with Gnome. Sure, Gnome is nice to have, it's all about C but it's showing its age. Like so many free software products, it is yet another proof that good quality demands a full time staff, and there is none for Gnome.

However, Unity is the piss-poor implementation of the piss-poor Gnome 2, which was the piss-poor implementation of the Mac OS 8 Human Interface Guidelines.

So it's recursively bad. It's just an endless spiral of shit. Ubuntu developers really need to get their heads out of their asses and take a look at the hardware accelerated Windows 8 (I know the UI is seriously broken, but the visual rendering is stunning) or Mac OS X. That is what a mass-market has come to expect, not an orange dock bar with icons in low-res an primary colors Get f*ing real!!

Face it: Linux distros have failed. Everyone of them. Debian crumbled under its own weight (now, official purveyor of royal free software jelly for the Ubuntu Queen), Red Hat once was good, but now they sell per seat licenses and they've fed the deject (known as Fedora - or "bad smell") to the community, SuSE never really was, Mandriva is a stupid distro with a stupid name, Slackware died (it was a one-man show), the other small distros are just orbiting parasites and never get any traction.

The BSD distros are the complete opposite: resilient, tried & true, solid, a no holds bared, no bullshit truly free software, disciplined, community & business oriented, quietly toiling away and perfecting their solutions, and recently offering an edge over Linux, with many technically superior innovations that will never even be ported because of the GPL.

Suck it up, Linux fanboys.

Yeah, what about Altoids Linux?

Rather, what is astounding is the virginity!

Among people like me? Not Ubuntu. Not even Mint. Debian is getting closer.

1998 is calling...Please transfer your call with a hookflash.

I think it really speaks volumes about competence and vision when a millionaire took a bunch of supposedly übergeeks from Debian and came up with Unity, while, another millionaire took Unix developers and developed a full-on Unix-based GUI based on the Smalltalk-inspired objective-C, then took a microkernel that was dead in the FSF's water, souped it up with BSD user land and came up with Mac OS X. Now, you tell me, who is the wisest?

WTF are you talking about? If you use Ubuntu, you use a product of Shuttleworth's company. And what is this "community" you're talking about? Linux developers sometimes don't have the decency of writing portable Unix software (as anybody with a BSD experience witll tell you - Autotools my ass!). Is Red Hat part of the "community"? If it is, then they suck, because Fedora sucks, they're Red Hat's fart, and Red Hat sells per-seat licenses. So does SuSE. And the failing Mandriva. Debian ceased to exist on its own a long time ago, when their workflow imploded the distro, grinding eveything to a halt. It is now officially the provider of royal jelly for the Queen Bee of free software, Ubuntu.

See: http://lunedemiel.tm.fr/anglais/07.htm

Shuttleworth is the Zuckerberg of free software. Since the Linux crowd has been gullible enough to believe you don't have to pay for advanced software tools, now he's out to sell your data. What is the poor man to do, if he wants a little profit? Surely, he can't keep paying his employees, dedicated full time to fixing Debian's shortcomings, out of his own pocket, can he? So he's gonna sell YOU.

All should be well in your philosophy, because Free Software is made effortlessly. The only people that have to pay for their own tools are the 99% of non-TI workers: the doctors, the carpenters, the farmers. They must buy microscopes, endoscopes, a wood saw, a truck, a tractor. But people who need compilers must not. Software falls off a tree. Or it's magically made by the Debian packagers. Wait...But what do they "package"? Oh, that's right! Software made by other people! Oh, my! I'm so confused...

The part I don't really grasp is...do you *actually* pay for hardware ?! If so, then why?! Why don't you just grab a notebook and run out of the store?!

Kids who've got no important data, no important software they're writing, no important network set-up, that is, kids who just sit at mom and pop's basement, with a Windows machine by their side, keep recommending that you reinstall all the time.

WTF do you want? You do not want to pay for software, you want it free, but since the Free Software crowd in Linux is unable to deliver a decent experience, you've welcomed Mr. Shuttleworth's Wonderful Piggybacking Adventure in Debianland. Now, how do you expect he should pay his employees and run a business?

This is what happens, kids. You've been told you are to pay for nothing. You've been told that advanced software should be free. Never mind that you still pay for hardware, or cars, or power tools at your garage (a contractor pays much more for his tools than you have come to expect to pay for yours, although most of your tools are offshoots or direct products of PhDs). But software! Hey, software should be free as shit is free! You've been told supporting businesses is illegal - almost - or at least immoral. Now you get what you pay for.

So, stop complaining and quit with the whining. Or face the fact that free as in "libre" software is only free because someone else is freeing up the costs for you (by either entering the GPL/proprietary double-blind cynical scheme, or using a business-friendly license). There is no free lunch. There is no pool of full time experts in free software. Experts don't work for nothing. Only the low-skilled works for nothing. Everybody's gotta eat, and not everyone is a lonely celibate as Stallman, that can just go around collecting money for his Church.

You keep kidding yourselves that Linux is the victor of Free Software, when all it was was part of an IBM backed-up business plan to kill proprietary Unixen. Linux is driven by corporations, and now you will begin to eat each other's livers. All that will remain is going to be Shuttleworth's Spyware Machine and Red Hat's per seat licenses. Debian sucks, Fedora is the RedHat dump site, Mandriva is moronically managed, SuSE - wtf is SuSE?, and all the small distros are insignificant. You thought being business-hostile was good, but you've embrace hypocrisy to the utmost, while deriding the BSD distros, which never claimed to ride such high horses of morality and always supported businesses.

You want it all, but you can't have it...

Emacs is great for doing some text processing text you might otherwise do with, say, a Perl (or whatever) script.

I'm not talking about the equivalent stuff you can do in Vim too. AFAIK, you can do "batch text processing" with Vim, but it's not nearly as sophisticated as Emacs, simply because emacs has emacs lisp, with its huge number of primitives for text processing. It's not a coincidence that, whenever someone wants an editor to understand the syntax of their new, "crazy" (or maybe "cutting edge"), programming language somebody writes an Emacs mode for it.

Emacs power user Xah Lee has many examples for Emacs in the context of text processing at his site:

http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/elisp.html

Although Vim is a powerful editor, it certainly is a primitive experience writing code in it, in particular when you compare it with the syntax and error checking today's best tools can do (such as the awesome Xcode). So, I can see why people like Vim (it's very ergonomical) but, down the road, I don't see people programming with it for much longer.

Emacs OTOH has a whole lot more to offer. And every once in a while talks of re-writing Emacs in Common Lisp come up. Now that would be something!, because you would potentially end up with an excellent tool with GUI capabilities (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp_Interface_Manager), that would simply rock for the creation of more & better non-proprietary IDE tools. Of course, that involves re-implementing CLIM (available on proprietary Common Lisp IDEs, so no-one really cares to), because of the GPL license (yet another example on how the GPL is counter-productive).

My left hand prefers Emacs, but my right hand like Vi.

I'm not sure, but there might be non-C system code in OS X (Objective-C) and Windows (C++, C#). In FreeBSD, there's Forth in the bootloader (does that count?).

I think you meant: Linux developers only use C for system programming.

Sounds like you are unaware of the algorithm benchmarks regarding Lua's register-based JIT.

Sounds like you are unaware that heavy-players in the video game industry *all* mix & match Lua and C++ for their engines.

Wow! You must know something we don't! Why don't you get a job in a big software house in the games industry and tell them how *wrong* they all are?