They're people like me, and they live all around you.

I live east of Pflugerville, and even during rush hour can usually get to anywhere downtown in 25-27 minutes (yes, we timed it -- in response to many and varied claims that one could not go to the grocery store without some kind of 45 minute trek at the very least).

The problem is twofold: people who live on the western side, for the longest time, lost their one good route north/south (MoPac) so they could add another lane. This has been "fixed" very recently, but I can't say if it's helped. And Two, you aren't "commuting" within Austin so much as you're driving _from_ outside of Austin, clear across austin, to what sounds like somewhere else outside of austin. That's... what, 30 miles? Hardly what I'd call an average commute for the area. An _average_ commute for the area is maybe a third of that.

This also fails to mention that every single tech company I've worked for in over a decade allows offset hours specifically to deal with rush hour. My typical eight hour stint, when I worked in an office, was 11-7, with a 20 minute commute either way because of the time of day (and that was south, on 71, to Lake Creek on 183). Also fails to mention the rise of telecommute options: even a couple days a week average a horrible commute out to something livable.

I do not know how it could take you an hour to get from Round Rock to North Austin. Our roads might be poorly structured, but it doesn't even take me twenty minutes to get from my version of BFE to the Arboritum, and that's at 8:30am.

Finally: people in Austin do quite frequently move to at least the side of the river their job is on. It's more the regular than it is not, and for reasons of commute.

Just a nitpick:

IntelliJ and Eclipse are both cross platform and available on Linux.

I'm a developer. I like Unity, and have actually come to prefer it - with a few caveats.

Mostly, I think its great after I:
- Get rid of the hide-and-seek Launcher (make it always visible)
- Get rid of the hide-and-seek scrollbars (make them always visible)
- Get rid of the hide-and-seek global menu (which means no global menu - but that's better than having to reveal it all the time)

Basically, I think the ideas are sound - indicators, Launcher, Dash... but automagically hiding key parts of the UI from me is a pain in the ass. I came here to work, not play a fucking mini-game.

Of course, at THAT point, with all those customizations, it bears little difference from Gnome3 with a Docky dock on the left. Which is what I'm currently doing right now, because Unity is about a hundred megs heavier, and Gnome-Shell has some things in it that I actually like more (like built-in dessktop recording; in-shell messaging; interactive notifications; and SUCH a well-designed theme that I'm using it, even though I hate blue).

I don't think this complaint has a lot of merit, honestly, and for two reasons:
- The "menu" system is still there, and somewhat easier to browse thanks to the icons being larger
- You can search for FUNCTION instead of App name, and this actually works (example: "Music player" or "play music" or "zip a file")

Of course, I HATE the "Activities" "area" with the burning passion of a thousand suns. If you design your OS to be "distraction-free", you might not want to design your shell to require people to zoom out and go somewhere different every thirty seconds. I swear, without a Dock, Gnome-Shell is unusable for me.

What a nightmare that was.

If I were a Google developer, I would WANT anyone who thinks this is a deal-breaker to use a different browser.

I wouldn't care which, just so long as it wasn't the one I was helping develop.

You ARE aware that the OpenOffice people created the split, right? As in, kicked out all the LibreOffice people for even *thinking* about a more open-source friendly split?

No, you are not.

Full disclosure: even before Unity, my setup was almost identical to it. Panel up top, dock-like thing on the left (for so, so many practical, HID-compliant, common-sensible reasons).

I *wanted* to use it in 11.04, but it simply wasn't technically ready. Memory leaks; lens tiles I didn't use but couldn't remove; crashes; no systray workaround; etc. etc.

So after suffering Gnome3 for a few months (made tolerable only by using Docky to get around that stupid ass "Activities" mistake), its like they addressed every single item of concern for me, even things on my wishlist. Take this for what its worth, but Unity is my OS of choice now; I prefer it to OS X and Windows-anything.

golemite beat me to it, but the team making DE:HR has been developing Thi4f simultaneously.

It's coming, and the success of DE:HR gives me hope they won't totally bork it up.

Great!

Now maybe they can stop fooling around with this game and get to the franchise that's actually awesome (Thief) instead. ;-)

I wish I could upvote this.

OMG so much THIS.

First game I'd ever seen where you get in your own way *by design*. Seriously, what idiot thought this was a good idea.

It's funny. I remember the one thing I thought when I first saw KDE 4.0, freshly released:

"You gotta be _kidding_ me... are they serious with this? What group of people thought this paradigm was a good idea? And who could possibly have actually thought this product was finished enough to release?"

Oh, how the tables have turned.

Gnome 3, as a concept, is simply made of fail for me. My job often requires me to work with several apps simultaneously, something G3 makes almost _impossible_. The whole idea behind Gnome 3 is that the G3 team knows more about how a user best works with a computer than the user his/herself, and the problem I have with it is that they are wrong. When I use Gnome 3, I am blind to how much space I have left, how busy my computer is, whether or not an app has crashed or gone zombie, or even what my other applications are doing. Its too constricting; in the struggle to be "distraction free" (although I don't recall Gnome 2 actually being "distracting"), they end up treating me like a horse and making me wear blinders so I can get things done "the Gnome way". Too bad if you are doing a task that requires peripheral vision.

Unity... I really wanted to like it. And to be fair, I do like it; but it is so unpolished, unadjustable, and riddled with fairly severe pixmap/memory leaks that I can't possibly use it for production purposes. I have a feeling the next release or two will be good, and even this one will be fine once they fix those leaks, but right now... not so much. And the crouching tiger, hidden menu thing is far more annoying than the concept of a Global Menu all by itself.

XFCE is good. Really good. But there are some problems with it, particularly with the Compositor, that made me look elsewhere.

So I bit the bullet and installed KDE 4.6.

I can not BELIEVE how much I like it. For the first time in a long time, I feel like I am in complete control of my computer, and can do anything with it. Everything is configurable, and while that used to cause me headaches and hours of twiddling with knobs in the control center, things have changed. The options are organized so well and/or so easy to access (you can configure most objects by simply right-clicking on them) that I never really have to *find* the option to change. The hard-to-hit skinny scrollbars can be changed without hacking a gtkrc file. So can the window management buttons; it seems silly to me now that there was such an uproar when Ubuntu changed them to be on the left, since KDE 4 seems to have always allowed you to put them on any side and in any order you want, just as part of the package. The OpenGL composting is vsync'd by default, and this works *even with videos*, something Compiz still has yet to get right on the nVidia driver. The effects and animations have gone from "ridiculously excessive" to subtle, informative, effective, and at times, breathtakingly gorgeous.

If there are too many options, there is usually a text search bar to narrow things down.

And all of this comes without full machine hard-locks, or having that stupid dragon show up every twenty minutes to tell me something else core dumped. I can tell you that between 4.0 and 4.6, things seemed to have become very solid, very fast, and very reliable in a hurry.

And that's just the UI in general. The KDE apps are similarly well-done, and this time they've hired a designer to make them look as good as they work. Gone are the overbearing, wall-of-text-and-doodads interfaces; they seemed to have taken notes from Gnome 2 for a lot of apps (I swear Dolphin is like a clone of Nautilus Elemantary; reKonq looks almost indistinguishable from Chrome; Pidgin and Gaim bear more than a passing resemblance, etc). And while we're on the topic of Gnome apps, I'll never know if I'm actually using one, because Oxygen-GTK renders them in whatever KDE theme I happen to be using at the time.

Sure, there is an overabundance of strange and somewhat unnecessary toys ("Plasmoids"). The whole "desktop folder" thing is strange. But you don't have to use all that stuff if you don't want to, so I don't.

Right now, I've got my desktop and workflow set up exactly how I was happy with it: Small panel on top with monitors and indicators, Docky (which works great in KDE) on the left, and the Faenza icon set. I almost wouldn't know I was in KDE if it weren't for more featureful apps, desktop effects/animations I didn't have before (active window glow is probably my favorite), and the knowledge that if I want my computer to act a certain way, I can probably actually do it in KDE without resorting to finding and changing some archaic gConf string.

And I don't have to switch to some stupid "Activities" screen just to move windows around.

I'm impressed. Very impressed. I may be here for good.

The Gnome guys have completely lost the plot. This is evident with only two words: "Gnome Shell". Which is 1337 for "your workflow sucks, and so does multitasking."