Re: [tlug] refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Edward Middleton writes:

 > As much as everyone likes to hate the unity interface it is pretty easy 
 > for non technical users, IMNSHO more so then windows or osx ;)

Sure.  Wii is even easier yet.  Your point is what, precisely?

Mine is "non-technical users of *what*?"  The people who hate Unity
want to use their computers as general purpose information processors.
Unity shines for those who only want to use two apps[1] by making the
possibilities of general purpose computers fairly inaccessible, even
if you know your way around computers pretty well.  And it's very
costly if you have a slow computer (eg, using Ubuntu, or even Fedora
19, in a VM from Parallels or VirtualBox on my aging (4 years old)
MacBook Pro is just not acceptable).  Why not just create a ~/bin,
symlink the three recommended apps from there, and remove /bin and
/usr/bin from normal users' PATH?  I bet that would work just as well!

IOW, that's great for keeping 6-year-olds occupied with Dobutsu-no-
mori or whatever at minimum cost to Daddy.  But it bothers me that my
16-year-old isn't much past the same level.  I wish she had half as
much interest in teaching pixels how to dance as she does in teaching
her kohai.

BTW, as an OSS economist, I have to say that the whole approach to
Unity is scary.  For example (from the Mir/Unity Next pages):

    October 2013

    Unity Next & Mir window management are completely integrated with
    the rest of the system to support an Ubuntu Phone product. For the
    desktop/laptop form-factor, we want to fully replace X in user
    sessions and provide a legacy mode that allows to run legacy X
    clients against an on-demand rootless X server. A cascade of
    display servers/shells is implemented, with the session-level
    instances talking to a global system compositor instance,
    providing a flicker-free, tightly integrated and beautiful UX.

But note that this is not compatible with X, nor Wayland, out of the
box.  It's the Mac OS X + Xquartz model.  If you want to work cross-
platform, you can't use the Unity/Mir stuff (only) -- you either have
to support multiple backends or you have to invoke the compatibility
layer.  Translated into (US) English:

Beavis:  Hey, Butthead, that Unix fragmentation fiasco was fun!
Butthead:  Heh-heh, heh-heh.  Yeah, Beavis, let's do that again!

:-(

Footnotes: 
[1]  OK, a fairly small number, say up to about 20, most of which are
pretty independent of each other.