If you're in the situation like me where systemd has a SERIOUSLY deleterious effect on your computer, there's nothing stupid about switching to a distro that doesn't use it. Frankly, I'm sick of having my shutdowns delayed because for no apparent reason it wants to wait for 90 seconds for some process it doesn't even bother to identify to finish before finally shutting down. That said, I WAS rather hoping someone might post some top-level stuff as the OP requested about what's GOOD about systemd, so I could see if there's ANY benefit to it.

How does systemd remind you of windows? It's buggy and it breaks my computer.

If it lands on your system and you aren't aware (and how could you be) that it refuses to boot if any of the filesystems defined in /etc/fstab aren't available (think NFS mounts where maybe the remote machine is down or unreachable). OK, you can stop this happening by adding "nofail" to the filesystem's entry, but it's a bit late when you haven't got a bootable machine.

And there's the regular problem of delays in shutdown due to "a stop job is running". Which is a big enough pain in the arse when I want to shut my computer down and go out, but could cost a lot of money in a production environment if you need a fast shutdown and reboot.

Just about sums up these religious idiots.

When I worked for British Telecom, we had nice simple internal Usenet newsgroups. Some specific to particular business-related areas (like programming), others hobby-based (cycling, swimming, etc.) and some just for general chit-chat. No need for any expensive social-networking websites or anything like that, just a simple Usenet server buried in a data centre. It used to be a great way to get to know colleagues all over Britain, as well as a terrific resource when you needed help getting something working.

I'm glad I don't have kids. I'd hate them to be exposed at school to anything associated with that vile dingo. There's certainly going to be an ulterior motive behind it.

Even supposing the US government could be trusted (which it definitely can't), there are enough nationalistic nutters with guns to pose a serious risk to his life.

More opportunities for the American military to murder even more people around the world.

Nice to see the US still has it's priorities right[1]

[1] To help American readers, that's called irony.

I used to love KDE. In fact I've used it for something like ten years and even put up with the beta-level KDE4.0 in the foolish belief that it was worthwhile. But the sheer arrogance of the developers and their constant issuing of useless code has finally driven me away. Case in point, kaddressbook. Most recent version delivered to Mandriva lost all contacts set up in previous versions (you could get them back, but only after digging around to find out how) and not only deleted mailing lists but pretended to allow the creation of them while actually losing them as soon as they were saved. And apparently it's all the fault of the distros for not realising KDE were releasing non-functioning code and putting it out, not the fault of KDE for releasing crap. And they intend to keep it up. To quote http://userbase.kde.org/KAddressBook_4.4 "KAddressBook is a work-in-progress. That doesn't mean that it's unstable but it does mean that it's not complete. The layout you see in this version is very different from the older version, and it's quite possible that the next version will be different again, as we see more features being available to us again." With that sort of attitude, I suppose it's hardly surprising they've decided that everybody has to use over-blown useless crap like Nepomuk and Akonadi that just takes up huge amounts of system resource for little (if any) benefit. Having dumped KDE for IceWM, I now have a far more reliable, faster computer that's unencumbered by useless bloat. And about the only thing I actually MISS from KDE is the newsticker. But there are Firefox plugins that do the job, even if not quite as well, so it's a price worth paying to be shot of these "It's up to us whether we break your computer and if you don't like it, blame yourself or your distro" pillocks.

Speaking as a one-time user of Kubuntu, I certainly wouldn't argue with the suggestion that Mandriva's a FAR better KDE distro than Kubuntu. The KDE side of things on any *buntu version is a long way down their priorities; some of the stuff they shipped (like the bloody awful package manager "upgrade" a few years ago) was somewhere between useless and crap. It was things like that and the fact that every Kubuntu upgrade wrecked my system at least once (so I needed to restore from my backups) that sent me running from it and back to Mandriva.

The N900 works fine without needing to use the 'phone capabilities. I have no intention (or need) of using it for telephony, I just use it as a pocket computer and it does a good job. The N810 might be a good option; it'll be cheaper, but it's a lot less powerful and the OS is a lot older, so not everything you might want will build for it (for example, I've ported MySQL 5 to the N900 OS, but the N8XX series will only run MySQL 4).

http://newsarse.com/2009/08/07/rupert-murdoch-to-charge-idiots-to-read-rubbish/

And now FBReader works on the N900 I can finally retire my N800. And run my Linux programs while I'm reading...

Agree with Kadin2048 completely. After all, how is the address bar supposed to know when you've finished typing the URL you want to go to?

Besides which fact, there's already a way to go straight away to a URL without having to hit enter - highlight it wherever you want to copy it from, then middle-click anywhere on the browser apart from an input field. (Caveat: works with Linux, no idea if it'll work with a lesser OS.)