https://delta.chat/en/ That messaging app has already existed for years, the hard part is convincing everybody else to use it.

I've used Gnome ever since Red Hat Linux (not RHEL) more than 10 years ago. Switched to Ubuntu about 6 years ago. Gnome 2 worked fine.

Then came that mess Unity. And the Gnome 3 monstrosity.

I've tried KDE in and out. KDE 1. KDE 2. KDE 3. KDE 4. Always bloated, slow, buggy. Even the late, considered good KDE 4.6 and 4.7 releases. It would crash even with just a Konqueror file browser window. It sucked.

After Unity and Gnome 3, I've used KDE 4.6 and 4.7 exclusively last year, both in Ubuntu (always the latest version) at home and Fedora 15 and 16 at work. I swear I've tried. But I couldn't stand the bloat and the bugs.

So I've switched to XFCE, and never looked back. Simple, fast, customizable enough, just like Gnome 2 was.

I've been using Ubuntu/Xubuntu for the last 6 years, and I like playing games in emulators like MAME and Mednafen. Pulseaudio causes delays, sometimes of several seconds, with the libsdl pulseaudio package installed.

I have a simple 14 dollars Sound Blaster Audigy SE PCI card.

Purging Pulseaudio and using plain ALSA makes all of my sound problems go away.

The sound lag in some emulators is gone. I can even watch movie files with 5.1 surround sound without any problem, and several sound outputting applications such as the flash plugin under Firefox work simultaneously.

If the ads are what bother you, root your Android phone and install Adfree from Google Play. It installs a frequently updated hosts file that resolves almost every ad server to 127.0.0.1 (or another IP address of your choice).

And about the Google account privacy problem, you can have as many bogus accounts as you want. After all, they are "free".

What about the thousands (or even more) apps already written in VBScript+Access in business places all around the world? You can't seriously be thinking your average office worker drone would have more exposure to Python+SQLite reading material ("for dummies" books) than there are for MS Office apps (I fully agree that Microsoft is the devil, monopolists bastards etc). Some people here on /. seem to have very little connection to the real world... and I'm not that new here.