Trantarius

I love that they keep saying stuff like “introducing Ubuntu to the Christian community”, as if they couldn’t already use it.

When you hit the windows key (aka meta-key or super-key) it brings up the app launcher. You get a dock at the bottom with pinned or running apps (like a taskbar), and all of your open windows are presented in a sort of mini-version that lets you switch between them or move them between workspaces. There is a search bar that you can immediately type into to open any app with a .desktop file. There is also a button to bring up the app grid which shows your apps kind of like a mobile device’s home screen.

Not having a dock is one of my favorite things about gnome. I actually use an extension to hide the top bar too. There’s just something so satisfying about having 100% usable space on screen. I get all the info back in the win-key overlay, so I don’t really need that stuff on screen at all times.

Well letters don’t really have a single canonical shape. There are many acceptable ways of rendering each. While two letters might usually look the same, it is very possible that some shape could be acceptable for one but not the other. So, it makes sense to distinguish between them in binary representation. That allows the interpreting software to determine if it cares about the difference or not.

Also, the Unicode code tables do mention which characters look (nearly) identical, so it’s definitely possible to make a program interpret something like a Greek question mark the same as a semicolon. I guess it’s just that no one has bothered, since it’s such a rare edge case.

What? Nautilus (ubuntu default file browser) finds drives wherever they are mounted and lists as their own location, as if it was windows. That includes the default mount point. Even if it wasn’t detected, it can still get to the mount point by browsing through the file system normally.

Installing software can be done via a software manager (included in ubuntu and most other distros). Software not in the manager is usually distributed as a portable binary (also common on windows) or an app image (even easier to use than an installer). Once installed, that software is the same as on windows.

Besides basic file manipulation, installing/running software, and web browsing, what else does the average user even do? All of it can be done on linux, with or without CLI.

I think it’s the other way around. I often find only one source (if any) for configuring windows, and it’s some registry edit that hasn’t worked for years. On linux, there will be a dozen people providing multiple ways of getting it done, most of which work.

I use gnome 4 because it is the most “out of the way” DE. I disable the dock and use an extension to hide the top bar, so there is literally nothing on my screen but the program(s) I’m using. I haven’t found another DE that let’s me do that (hiding the dock/taskbar doesnt count, cause it still comes up when you get the mouse too close which is super annoying).

I also like the window presenter thing, which I first started using with KDE. I prefer gnome’s implementation though, since it is the same key to bring up the window selector and the app launcher. I often want to switch to a window only to find it isn’t open, or I want to open a program that already is open but hidden behind other windows, so it makes sense to put them together. I also can’t be bothered to learn more than one hotkey. I’ve tried to obtain this overall behavior in KDE, but I found it was a whole lot of configuration just to get what gnome already does, so I might as well just use gnome.

I found the “touchscreen-y” interface bothersome at first, but I’ve gotten used to it. The biggest issue is not showing a large number of app entries efficiently, but it’s pretty trivial to remove the entries you don’t actually need with alacarte.

Gnome’s default apps (like the newish gnome text editor) are getting too simplistic for my preference, but again it’s super easy to swap them out.

That’s kind of what GPL tries to do. It stipulates that any derivative must also be open source. However, no license can be truly effective at preventing corporations from using it without blocking legitimate uses too. Even GPL doesn’t prevent EEE, since they could just make the extensions proprietary (as long as they are not outright modifications of the original source). Even if the extensions aren’t proprietary, they could depend on servers that are. A license that doesn’t allow extensions or forks would defeat the whole purpose of being open source, so that’s not an option. The only way to stop them from using it would be to specifically exclude them and anybody else making over $X a year (from any source, since they can just lose money on threads until EEE is complete). But that would also exclude any fair implementation that just happens to be profitable. It would also make complying with the license more complicated, so people will switch to an alternative with a more permissive license anyway.