I've used Linux as my primary OS for real work since the early 2000s. Sure, it takes a little effort to get it working how you like bu then once that's done you leave it alone. If you stick to LTS type distributions you only need to stuff around with them every few years. I don't see what's so different with that to panel beating the likes of Windows 10 into a usable state (turn off all the phone home crap, remove the start menu's built in adverts etc.)

My daily driver OS is Mint 18.1 MATE on a Thinkpad X230 and its rock solid. Can't fault it really. Default desktop theme is already good, runs like a dream with Compton compositor with no screen tearing. It doesn't need much tweaking, just gets out of my way and works. Battery life is excellent. Weather applet works fine now though yes it was broken for a few months last year. I've been using Gnome 2 for a rather long time. Had used Ubuntu since it first came out in 2004 with 4.10 Warty Warthog. Once Unity came along around 2011 and annoyed me I went to Debian Squeeze with Gnome 2 desktop. After that grew too old I went to Mint MATE where I'll stay until something about it ends up pissing me off and I'll move on, it hasn't pissed me off yet though...

With a decent internet connection a Ubuntu update completes in under a minute in most cases. Then that's it. If a kernel upgrade was applied a polite reminder to reboot your computer pops up, but no rude forced reboot. Also there is no 10+ minutes of updates being installed "do not turn off computer" BS once you try to shut down the PC.

Yep, running Windows a VM on a Linux host is the only sane way to do it if you're forced to use Windows for some task. Dodgy MS update borks things? Laugh and roll back to a snapshot from before the update. RAM and HDD space is cheap.

Yes, have been using it for years professionally without any problem. The 'MS Office' issue is long solved.

Couldn't you just set a cron job to do an 'apt-get update' and 'apt-get -y upgrade' nightly?

That's all very well but is the average Joe or Jill going to know to do that?

And the hot weather down under was caused by a high pressure system in the Tasman sea deflecting south the usual run of cold fronts passing over South Eastern Australia. I wonder if that blocking high pressure system was kept there by a meandering jet stream as mentioned in the article?

The timing of this post on the front page is a little too timely. The prime minister Kevin Rudd today announced the date the federal election is to be held. It will be September 7th. Me thinks the poster is quite possibly a card carrying Australian Labor Party (ALP) member.

There seems to be a lot of scaremongering going on in regards to the Liberal National coalition's NBN policy. The ALP is promising fibre to the building in all cases except for where it is completely infeasible (e.g. remote towns out in the desert etc.). Sounds great but it will be expensive. Probably somewhere well over $50 billion. The coalition is promising fibre to the node with fibre to the building available at cost to the user for those that need it. Coalition's will be a fair bit cheaper as it won't be funding fibre to every building.

The ALP's NBN policy page

The Liberal National coalition's NBN policy page

Debate over which of the two policies is superior is healthy but blatant biased scaremongering is not.

Melbourne Telstra business ADSL 243ms

They won a $368 million judgement against Apple. Also Siemens caved in and signed an agreement with them. Looks like they are far from dead unfortunately.

I'm not sure even this is enough. Surely the only way you can be sure the source code you are inspecting belongs to the binary is to compile it yourself.

Windowmaker dockapps did this well over a decade ago.

It has a 1600x900 matte screen.