keypress

I'm impressed with better fonts. Only my hardware still lacks, my display is 1280x800 pixels. And however I seem to muck about with settings it never feels entirely comfortable. Aliased bitmap fonts in a terminal are probably easier on my eyes. Web sites are quite horrid to look at. Which seems counter intuitive. I don't really miss my CRT and low display resolutions, but I think for a 12 inch monitor more resolution helps, especially with anti-aliasing. But this stuff is superficial compared with actual functionality.

I think the articles comments about poor calendar and contact applications really highlight missing functionality. Outlook did well I think because of the calendar integration. Even the most architecturally stunning systems aren't worth much without a great application eco-system. That's no slant on Linux.

I have road driven Gnome 3, and in the most part it buys me nothing. Unity gives me the creeps. So I run a normal windows and taskbar desktop (bit like win 95), but I must say it's still pretty sucky. Partly because of inconsistencies across the platform.

Applications end up doing their own file management for example.

There are alternative innovative ways to access menus and trigger actions. Context tasks etc. But people are stuck in the past it's like they can't imagine anything different.

Linux also has inconsistencies between windowing tool-kits.

Mobile gets a little more attention these days. But that seems to also be stuck in a rut.

I meant experimental forks. Ubuntu foisting unity upon people was pretty damaging. Again if only they'd concentrated on the last 10%. Instead of creating a mess.

With age some tasks have become harder for me. I used to be quite a whizz at dragging and dropping, and fine pointer precision. Now I'm a bit of a fat handed twat, and my eyes aren't that great. I really do need a 10ft display with simple controls.

A lot of this is stuff is usability and ergonomics 101.

A huge issue in the past was the lack of a good web browser. Firefox really helped. Other annoyances were little things like Flash player. I've used Linux on the desktop as my main OS for at least a decade. Personally I'm really disappointed with the lack of noticeable progression on the desktop. There is a dearth of great desktop applications.

As the article mentions, Thunderbird as an email client is _okay_. Rewind back to the late 90s, and applications like Winamp were pretty amazing, it just needed a better user interface. There are loads of music applications on Linux, but I end up using CLI mplayer and even Foobar2k under Wine, because of some of the other shortcomings.

Even the core of Linux desktop applications like Nautilus feel like they are regressing. When a file manager in my mind should be at the heart of an OS. Mounts and copying should be very intuitive.

Much functionality exists in CLI apps, but is stripped out or lacking in desktop applications. Having something like Rsync in your file manager could be great. And better integration with something like Git. But that's after the core utility of the application is polished to the max.

It's the final 10%, and I appreciate how difficult that is, with moving targets weird Window tool-kits and other abstractions and APIs, but it's that polish that makes it.

Having said that Windows always feels like a fragmented Frankenstein's monster with UI inconsistencies not only across core applications but also with third party ones.

While some of the desktop paradigms have worn well, I don't see much radical experimentation on the desktop, and Linux could provide exactly the platform to try things out.

But even distros like Mepis or Knoppix were good pre-ubuntu.

When hardware works out the box, everything is fine and dandy. As soon as it doesn't like with many OSs, it's a time waster, you loose your confidence with the entire project.

As an English speaker this comes across as such a horrible name (for me at least).

A typo: alt-abc?

And the legacy seems to be a comment system that's impossibly hard to follow. Reply button implies some kind of threads but I just see disjointed fragmented comments that just end up in more confusion, and more worthless comments. I wish they'd pull comments from besides videos.

Witnessed both a mac and windows machine having software/networking glitches, both with non-esoteric hardware pretty much at factory settings. I wish it was a case of use just fire up and forget, but sadly 'bugs' plague all platforms.

I still have a ball mouse, I think it's the first I bought way back in 2000 or some such and it's fine to use provided it's kept clean and used on a good surface.

I'd still prefer a video link, and leave it to my client to negotiate. I have never enjoyed viewing embedded videos in web pages (content aside).

Back in the day we'd try and get page sizes down to less than 100k.

The Internet isn't fast for everyone. I (in the UK) have no 3G signal, let alone 4G and my broadband speed is pitiful - but it will do. There is nothing I can do to ramp the pipe speed up. I do end up turning off JS and images a lot of the time, because otherwise it ills me.

As a web dev, I don't care for bloat. So I find it particularly irksome, and currently it's enough to deter me from going mobile. Once I'd have dreamed about having a modern smartphone in my pocket with any Internet connection, but the friction currently today puts me off. The UK was recently slammed for its retrograde networks.

Bad name. How about: "I'm here.", or "Where are you?". Trusted contacts sounds more like a FOAF vouch, or authenticated contact details app.

If it weren't for tabs, a window resize could help there.

I get very lazy in a hot shower, and just want to lap up as much heat as I can get. I'll happily stand there and keep nudging up the hot tap. My skin probably suffers a lot for it. Whereas a cold shower, I'm probably in and out in less than 5 mins.

You don't have to have cold showers everyday. I default to cold, and when grimy go for hot. You only really need to soap the places where the sun doesn't shine. And your hair doesn't need shampooing everyday. But each to their own.

I like cold showers, and hot ones. I can never have a shower hot enough though, and getting out always is chilling. Whereas once you get out a cold shower, you only feel warmer. Preferably you don't want to leave the cold for freezing. I swam in a mountain stream late autumn last year (in the UK). It was so icy entering the stream, I thought it was never going to happen. After a few attempts and acclimatisation I was happily immersed. A little sun on the skin afterwards left me totally re-energised and awake. So just stick with it if you want to give it a go. Much like a cold shower, it's initially shocking, but becomes pleasurable. The human body is quite odd!

What's impressive about it?

Debian 8, about 560MB of 4GB with no apps (but for system monitor), and about 760MB of 4GB with Chromium open, with one tab (new tab).

That didn't sound impressive to me at all, then I checked my memory use on Debian with Gnome Desktop, and was a bit shocked. It's hard to gauge memory use, but considering I used to play with OSs that would load to 64MB of RAM it's hard to see what I'm really getting here in terms of perks. Network manager and some mounting help is about all that's useful from Gnome Shell for me.