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[Tellemurius]

Windows 8 doesn't even look that bad, except for the absence of the start menu. Certainly doesn't look any worse than Unity and it looks a whole heck of a lot like Gnome 3. I probably won't ever use 8, because I don't plan on buying a PC that will need Windows for a few years, but it doesn't really look as bad as people are saying it does. It's certainly not fair to say that people who use Windows are unintelligent or idiots either. Maybe they just like to play PC games?

That said, I'm looking forward to this, because it will be nice to run regular Linux applications on a phone, because my experience with Android apps has been pretty hit or miss. Unity looks like it was made for this too. I wonder if I'll be able to install this on my Android Cowon mp3 player.

from what i read all programming is done either in html5 or the usual programming code built on ARM libraries.

[Fenrir]

XDA is telling me its still unlockable, check their sites and ask them

Everything I am reading on the xda-developers forum is suggesting that the exploit doesn’t work after the 4.1.1 update, and I have never found anything to unlock the bootloader (but SafeStrap is an option if I could get root). There is a way to update and keep root if you had it previously, but I did not consider doing this when I installed the update, and I wiped my phone when I tried to run the exploit again, so I am well screwed by my carelessness at this point. Looks like I’m staying locked up tight until either the hacker gods see fit to grant lusers a new exploit, or I become a hacker god myself.

[Sir Finkus]

Meh, call me back when their desktop distribution stops being such a buggy mess.

You know one way or the other, Ubuntu is still the best FREE OS out there, huge hardware support, its literally idiot-proof.

"Best free OS" isn't really saying much.  It still isn't ready for primetime.  Here are some of the bugs/annoyances I experienced:
-Unity crashes on a regular basis.  Sometimes lockups, sometimes the window decorations just disappear
-Dock problems for random programs (icons not showing up, programs showing up as not running in the dock)
-System fonts changing after installing new ones
-Lack of working vsync on the desktop
-Random slowdowns
-A bug that wasn't fixed for 6 months that would freeze your entire computer with certain applications on encrypted partitions.  This was stuff on the default install.

I ran Ubuntu for 2 years almost exclusively through 12.04.  Probably about once a week, I'd run into some annoying bug or problem that I'd need to fix.  Eventually, I decided it just wasn't worth the effort and stopped running it.  I've tried many different Linux distributions, and I don't think ANY of them are ready for desktop use.  Sure, it can be done, but it isn't going to be worth the hassle for most people. 

[miauw62]

Wich is why i like Win7. It's inuitive, compatible with almost anything, and it generally works.

[ChairmanPoo]

I've gotten more problems and crashes out of win7 than out of linux. At the moment the only reason I keep win7 is for the odd game that doesnt run on wine, and steam (which is highly buggy both in windows and linux). I don't even consider the idea of using windows while doing anything remotedly serious. Hell, I don't even access my e-mail accounts from it.

[Sergius]

Anyone with brains now buys (Downloads) Linux. Now if we could just cull the unintelligent masses...

I am a serious FOSS fanboy, and I will probably never run Windows, but that is unfair. Windows, as much as I don’t care for it, has far more software written for it, and it comes installed on most hardware, so most people, if they even know of an alternative, have no reason to use anything other than the OS that is already installed on their machine, and, even if they did, would not be able to run most of the software that is for sale, and risk finding that some of their hardware is either unsupported or a pain to get working. So it isn’t simple stupidity.

Windows 8. All I'm saying.

*cough*
Not everyone upgraded to windows 8, you know.

Wait 'till you need a new computer and all you can get is one where you can't turn UEFI off.

[Eagleon]

Can we all just agree that OSes in general are kind of overburdened as it is, and can't generally keep up with their own projects? Linux and Windows both have silly problems that would be solved by leaving behind the idea that an OS has to function as a juicer with GPS functionality and a built in media player, and working on little things instead, like getting sound working consistently for every application without having to go into command line, or designing security that isn't either a joke or crippleware.

[Tellemurius]

Can we all just agree that OSes in general are kind of overburdened as it is, and can't generally keep up with their own projects? Linux and Windows both have silly problems that would be solved by leaving behind the idea that an OS has to function as a juicer with GPS functionality and a built in media player, and working on little things instead, like getting sound working consistently for every application without having to go into command line, or designing security that isn't either a joke or crippleware.

Linux wasn't ever meant to be easy for people to use, its just really popular due to the fact that its not windows or OSX

[Killjoy]

Linux wasn't ever meant to be easy for people to use, its just really popular due to the fact that its not windows or OSX

You're actually very wrong, Linux is not hard to use, it is just different than windows. It is popular with tech savvy people because it offers a lot of freedom, and offers possibilities out of the box that windows does not. Such as a functioning command line(With all the unix goodies that implies), a very well featured packaging system and a bunch of other features that makes a lot of development very smooth.

I used to be a hardcore windows only guy (still have win7 on my gaming computer), but then I studied computer science, and now I seriously don't care what OS I am using. Right now I am sitting on Linux Mint, and it works perfectly for Python/Java development which I have been forced into. I still prefer Windows for c++/c# development, as Microsoft offers some very convenient tools for that.

[Tellemurius]

Linux wasn't ever meant to be easy for people to use, its just really popular due to the fact that its not windows or OSX

You're actually very wrong, Linux is not hard to use, it is just different than windows. It is popular with tech savvy people because it offers a lot of freedom, and offers possibilities out of the box that windows does not. Such as a functioning command line(With all the unix goodies that implies), a very well featured packaging system and a bunch of other features that makes a lot of development very smooth.

really? Try giving some average guy on the street the objective of installing ArchLinux under 2 hours

[ChairmanPoo]

There are plenty of easy-to-install linux distros. Often with autoinstallers included. "Blah blah blah Archlinux is hard" is a rather cherrypicked example.

[miauw62]

Can we all just agree that OSes in general are kind of overburdened as it is, and can't generally keep up with their own projects? Linux and Windows both have silly problems that would be solved by leaving behind the idea that an OS has to function as a juicer with GPS functionality and a built in media player, and working on little things instead, like getting sound working consistently for every application without having to go into command line, or designing security that isn't either a joke or crippleware.

My ideal OS would be an OS I notice just enough of. Win7 is pretty close for me (after turning UAC off). But there are things that come pre-installed that I don't need. I was going to say windows media player here but then I realized that's pretty usefull for playing sound and movie files without installing something else first. But mayby it's a tad too heavy.

Then there are the things that come pre-installed that you just can't miss, like solitaire.

[Eagleon]

Linux wasn't ever meant to be easy for people to use, its just really popular due to the fact that its not windows or OSX

You're actually very wrong, Linux is not hard to use, it is just different than windows. It is popular with tech savvy people because it offers a lot of freedom, and offers possibilities out of the box that windows does not. Such as a functioning command line(With all the unix goodies that implies), a very well featured packaging system and a bunch of other features that makes a lot of development very smooth.

I used to be a hardcore windows only guy (still have win7 on my gaming computer), but then I studied computer science, and now I seriously don't care what OS I am using. Right now I am sitting on Linux Mint, and it works perfectly for Python/Java development which I have been forced into. I still prefer Windows for c++/c# development, as Microsoft offers some very convenient tools for that.

You have obviously never attempted to produce music on linux. Or if you have, you don't mind that absolutely anything using sound can fail due to multiple layers of audio routing. If that's the case I don't know what to say to you. Many times there's no way to know where something is failing without digging through configuration files or using obscure command line inquiries. It's an absolute mess. Granted the more popular applications probably work right out of the box, but isn't the point of open source to get away from that kind of clustering and popularity contest? Shouldn't the OS team be working towards minimizing their own contribution to the tangle? I very rarely if ever have had problems with the audio in open-source software released on Windows, what is Linux's excuse?

Sure it might offer greater options, but that's kind of pointless if things fail to work at some basic level of functionality to begin with. Having to read a twelve page manual after installing an application just to find out it doesn't provide compatibility with the audio software you've gotten working at the moment is the opposite of 'easy to use', sorry.

My ideal OS would be an OS I notice just enough of. Win7 is pretty close for me (after turning UAC off). But there are things that come pre-installed that I don't need. I was going to say windows media player here but then I realized that's pretty usefull for playing sound and movie files without installing something else first. But mayby it's a tad too heavy.

Then there are the things that come pre-installed that you just can't miss, like solitaire.

Yeah, 7 has been pretty satisfactory, in fact my only gripe with it is that ext2 volume manager chokes on it somehow and certain things fail with it, due to UAC and I think some intrinsic issues with mixed-case filenames. Hardly Microsoft's fault, though I do wish they'd catch up with the times so that defragmenting could finally disappear into the forgotten bowels of the past.

[JWNoctis]

Wait...Isn't Android essentially a VM shell built atop a Linux kernel? Correct me if I'm wrong.

And with M$ trying to lock all other OSes out of IBM PC, I'd say that there are bigger fishes to fry for the Linux community than some spiffy smartphones. Linux is good for many but not all...At least not for certain laptops. The last time I checked, there were still few solution for the dual GPU arrangement on many newer notebooks that will make good use of the dedicated one, and the kernel was still having trouble with certain x86 CPU's multiplier stepping feature - or at least it was marked as deprecated in the makefile. My linux-fu is still not strong.

Or at least I wouldn't expect any average computer user nowadays to use Linux properly w/o scratching off a good amount of hair and something else. But it is true that a good frontend might change this, and Ubuntu has at least tried very hard towards that.

[palsch]

Wait...Isn't Android essentially a VM shell built atop a Linux kernel? Correct me if I'm wrong.

Basically. Also Firefox mobile and (Open)webOS, which are both HTML5/Javascript/CSS based and completely open source (or nearly there with webOS) on a Linux base. I have had a Linux command line on my webOS phones from shortly after the OS was released.