I'm typing this from a machine that had (K)ubuntu 9.10 installed in 2009 and has been continuously upgraded since, so this is not just a feature of a rolling distro. Running a rolling distro is pretty much like being a software tester (granted, all Linux users have to be developers to an extent). The whole premise of preferring the latest hinges on the fact that there are some missing features in the current version. Everyone of us has a special interest area where we need to stay current. For me, it's the graphics drivers that I need to keep reasonably latest, and I use a PPA for that. However, outside of the security fixes, I don't care if my browser is at the latest version since I don't do "web". I mostly don't care if my desktop environment is at the latest version, I definitely don't care if various utilities I use are at the latest version. For me, the risk of having my system broken by a random update is just not worth it. I am involved in creation of the "bleeding edge" software professionally and I know how the sausage is made, so while I appreciate the early adopters, I prefer not to be one unless it's a calculated risk.

Isn't Uber "Over" in German anyway? Kinda prophetic.

Thank you for the insightful comment. Facebook is no worse than any other communication channel. I do not like its realname policy, but it's not unprecedented - an absolutely voluntary FidoNet in 1980-1990s also required real names. And there are a lot of people who don't abide by it anyway.

IMHO: live and let live. If anything, I'd prefer sites to have some ads than paywalls. I'm Okay with a reasonable amount of advertising, there's no free lunch after all. And sometimes I learn about existence of new products that way.

There's no NWO. There's a scared, weak Europe of 450M people who are afraid that ~1M hungry and dirt poor refugees will take over.

Uhm, not really :) I used Fido which was almost the same. But both have much higher latency than Twitter, and what's worse, messages tend to grow in size (and time needed to consume them). Twitter's forced laconicism is very good at keeping discussions short and focused.

I may be missing something, since I haven't tried all of them, but it seems that none of those platforms can be called an "asynchronous IRC"? That's the appeal of Twitter for me:

• Like on IRC, nobody expects you to write blog posts but short messages.
• Like on IRC, you are talking to complete strangers and can be anonymous if wished.
• Like on IRC, you can mention anyone and the rest can join the conversation if they want to.
• Unlike on IRC (not accounting for bots), each message is automatically logged and can be shared via a unique and permanent URL.

Oh, and like on IRC, technically minded people tend to gravitate to the platform. Is there anything except Twitter that would offer the same features? There used to be identi.ca, but seems like it's gone now.

Ok, I should have said "surge of refugees from both Syrian and Ukrainian wars that highlighted inefficiency of EU bureaucracy and its inability to timely accommodate them".

When reaching out via Twitter, the conversation is public - and you cannot share a phonecall. As for other services, what would they be? Facebook is too personal, at least for me - I tend to not friend people whom I didn't meet. On Twitter I follow anyone who tweets on topics I'm interested in.

Twitter is really good at reaching out to people directly and in a semi-realtime fashion. It's like asynchronous IRC.

Not just English speaking word. I can give personal account that Poland is also affected by increased tensions between "right" and "left", to the point that the left set up a "Democracy Defense Committee" and does regular anti-governmental marches, while conservatives "unmask" them as traitors. Russia has seen its conservative "Movement against illegal immigration" banned by Putin due to concerns that it is leading straight to disintegration of the country by attacking (nominally) Russian citizens from North Caucasus.

Not from my personal experience, but my friends living in Hungary (remember Putin-leaning Orban?) and Scandinavian countries (remember Breivik?) are saying that intra-country social tensions are on the rise there too. The "migrant crisis" that is affecting the Europe at large is only exacerbating this.

Could you provide a bit more context? I'm interested, but I cannot find a reference of Microsoft ever providing Win32 implementation for Unix. Did you maybe mean SFU (which would be the other way around)?

Not sure. They are often configured with additional software (e.g. https://steelseries.com/engine), but I did not need any of that just to use such keyboards on Windows. However, since Windows installs USB drivers automatically when you plug the device (either from device partition or downloading from the net), I cannot 100% tell whether a special keyboard driver was needed or not. I guess I could check in Hardware Manager but I'm too lazy to boot that machine right now :)

#3 (X server) is not so guaranteed these days. On an unrelated note - systemd is actually a positive development in that context (of standardization Linux ecosystem).

Yes. Pretty much no existing API would be applicable since the abstraction jumped down several levels - like going from Java to C. You are now allocating and freeing memory buffers on the hardware, filling them out with the complete pipeline state information and passing to GPU to execute as is. I guess one could bolt this onto existing OpenGL API (NVidia tries to do that with GL_NV_command_list), but a) it is still higher level and b) interaction with the rest of GL remains problematic implementation-wise. Naturally a question arises: if that part of API is not interoperable with the rest, why not just separate the two?