You're correct of course, nothing on Earth really matters. We all will die eventually and the whole universe may (will?) be gone one day. Luckily I can mostly forget that and get excited about little things that don't really matter.

As much as I'd like to see GNU/Linux succeed on the desktop, my experience has been similar. How much of it is X's fault though, that I don't know. My guess is not much actually, but I'm curious if anyone knows better.

I don't understand where the fear of computers comes from. I would expect anyone who is comfortable driving a car at high speeds to have no trouble operating a small machine that doesn't have the potential to kill bystanders if your concentration lapses.

Your finger needs to slip quite a few times to add the --no-preserve-root to that command (it might be GNU coreutils exclusive though). :)

I've clicked the wrong button on a GUI several times, just as I've made typos on the command line. Both have the potential to screw things up unless I'm being careful.

Just like you might confuse the icon representing yyymy with yymyy.

Driving the kids to some place around the corner while they watch movies on iPads. Sounds so stereotypically American that it's funny!

Also it somehow makes me feel kinda old and I'm only 31...

I wonder if it's a settings issue (which would make it PEBKAC) but on my computer Windows 8 is more responsive than the latest version of Linux Mint I tried was (fairly sure it was version 14). The much-hated start screen appears instantly after pressing the super key, while there's a tiny but still noticeable delay until the Cinnamon start menu appears. Firefox also runs smoother on Windows than Linux in my experience.

There are many valid complaints to be made of Windows 8, but responsiveness is not one of its issues.

Could you give an example of a feature that you (or your business) would consider big and important enough to upgrade?
And if you remember could you tell which XP feature was the Big One that made you upgrade from Windows 2000 (unless you were running something else before and XP was merely the standard choice at the time you bought the machines).

(I might sound like I'm just arguing, but I'm genuinely curious.)

I'm sorry but this really looked like a Mycleanpc spam at first glance :)

I don't know about Python either, although I've been wanting to get into it. Of course, I wouldn't apply for a Python job in the first place. On the other hand I'm sure I've missed job opportunities sometimes because I tend to underestimate my abilities and only apply if I'm sure I can do the job, unlike those people i kan reed was talking about earlier.

Yes, that makes sense. But all that is orders of magnitude more complex than the FizzBuzz program, which merely requires that one is familiar with a loop and the modulo operation. So I think the parent's question still stands.

I don't change the bedsheets quite that often but otherwise yes. Are you suggesting that most people actually don't? I get your point but I think the comparisons are quite bad. Most people probably value a clean home, whereas few understand the value of backups (until they lose data).

Why do you use sudo when you're already root? :)

I hope you didn't mean to imply that digging ditches isn't respectable. It's not glamorous in the slightest, but I respect those who are willing and able to do the necessary dirty physical jobs.