03.11.14
Posted in News Roundup at 11:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Drones
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What the public needs to understand is that a U.S. citizen, under the protection of the Constitution, was denied due process despite criminal accusations. Instead of going through the justice system like any other alleged criminal, the government found it more convenient to use a killing machine as judge, jury and executioner. The president of the United States is tasked with upholding the Constitution, not throwing it away when it suits him or her.
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After a year long study of the use of drones to kill people, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Ben Emmerson has released his final report. It’s a manageable read at 22 pages. The summary by NYU’s Sarah Knuckey is the next best thing.
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Rapporteur says MoD has no wish to bring squadron of unmanned aircraft back to Britain after Afghan campaign ends
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And there has not been a reported drone strike for more than two months in Pakistan.
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Israel pulled its troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip in 2005, but maintains a naval and air blockade of the enclave and severely restricts the overland movement of people and goods across the volatile border.
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A suspected al Qaeda militant was killed in a drone strike late on Monday in Yemen’s central Maarib province, an oil-producing area where al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula operates, local tribesmen said.
The sources said three rockets, presumed to be fired by a U.S. drone, hit a car that a man who went by the name of Ebad al-Shabwani was driving. The car was completely burnt, the tribesmen said.
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Ukraine
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The media is clamoring to get Russia for attacking Ukraine, as if the US has had no influence on events.
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Events of the last few weeks in Ukraine have shown how fragile the state of the world is, how interdependent, and yet how badly served it is by leaders of the biggest countries. If there were a “Nobel Anti-Peace Prize,” Putin might win it, but it would be hard to separate him from so many leading contenders.
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U.S., Europe slam Russia over Crimean referendum
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Alarm at Russian expansion had at this time caused a flurry of British intelligence activity.
War on Privacy
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The US National Security Agency was stopped by a judge from destroying phone records collected via its controversial surveillance practices, after a privacy group said they are still relevant and could be used in the lawsuits against the agency.
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The FBI is now basking in the darkness the NSA used to occupy. The first leak had the FBI’s name all over it, and it’s the power granted to the FBI that allows the NSA to collect millions of domestic phone records. The NSA technically isn’t allowed to vacuum up domestic records. The FBI, however, is. But the NSA “takes home” the bulk collection and “tips” a few hundred phone numbers to the agency whose name is listed on the first page.
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Internet giant Yahoo has recruited Alex Stamos, one of the more vocal opponents of mass US spying, as its new chief information security officer (CISO).
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Glenn Greenwald, editor of the newly launched digital publication The Intercept, told attendees at SXSWi that the National Security Agency is wary of anyone who takes steps to protect their online activity from being hacked, such as using encryption tools.
“In [the NSA's] mind, if you want to hide what you’re saying from them, it must mean that what you’re saying is a bad thing,” Greenwald said via a Skype video call. “They view the use of encryption… as evidence that you’re suspicious and can actually target you if you use it.”
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If the physical handset case is prised open, the phone will automatically erase all data it holds.
Ask Boeing for more details if you dare.
Call us paranoid, but you may very well find the NSA has opened a file on you.
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Vodafone’s new smartphone app Secure Call could have protected Angela Merkel from the NSA.
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Well, hold on there a minute, Arthur, you incorrigible skeptic you. What about the latest revelation from The Intercept, the flagship enterprise of First Look? Just last weekend, the Interceptors dug into this vast trove of criminality to inform us that … the NSA’s newsletter has its own Dear Abby column (or “agony aunt,” as the Brits would say). Now how about that! The NSA has an internal advice column offering tidbits on personnel issues. Now that’s transformative journalism with a vengeance! Just think how many innocent lives now doomed to die from Washington’s surveillance state-supported death squads will now be saved because of this revelation!
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A major overhaul of the EU data protection rules and MEPs’ findings and recommendations after six months investigating US mass surveillance schemes will be debated on Tuesday from 15.00. The data protection reform would greatly strengthen EU citizens’ control over their personal data and punish firms which pass it on without permission.
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Germany on Monday dismissed a claim by NSA leaker Edward Snowden that it had bowed to US demands to water down privacy rights for German citizens.
Snowden told the European parliament in a statement published Friday that Germany was pressured to modify its legislation on wiretapping and other forms of lawful telecoms surveillance. The former National Security Agency contractor didn’t elaborate on how the laws were changed or when, but suggested it was standard practice for the NSA to instruct friendly nations on how to “degrade the legal protections of their countries’ communications.”
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NSA leaker Edward Snowden says New Zealand is one of a number of countries the US spy agency helped to change laws in order to enable mass surveillance.
The revelation came during his written answers to questions from the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee. The committee is undertaking an inquiry into mass electronic surveillance of EU citizens launched following Snowden’s original allegations of widespread internet surveillance.
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The likely next director of the National Security Agency will testify on Tuesday for the first time about his new job, in perhaps the agency’s best chance for a post-Edward Snowden reboot.
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Increasingly, we are watched not by people but by algorithms. Amazon and Netflix track the books we buy and the movies we stream, and suggest other books and movies based on our habits. Google and Facebook watch what we do and what we say, and show us advertisements based on our behavior. Google even modifies our web search results based on our previous behavior. Smartphone navigation apps watch us as we drive, and update suggested route information based on traffic congestion. And the National Security Agency, of course, monitors our phone calls, emails and locations, then uses that information to try to identify terrorists.
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SURVEILLANCE WHISTLEBLOWER Edward Snowden has taken part in a video conversation at the South By Southwest (SXSW) conference along with representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union.
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Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower whose unprecedented leak of top-secret documents led to a worldwide debate about the nature of surveillance, insisted on Monday that his actions had improved the national security of the United States rather than undermined it, and declared that he would do it all again despite the personal sacrifices he had endured.
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Among the biggest revelations made by the Snowden documents so far was of course the fact that in addition to negotiating with companies like Yahoo and Google for user data via the front door (PRISM), the NSA was also busy covertly hacking into the links between company data centers for good measure (trust is the cornerstone of any good relationship, you know). The moves pretty clearly pissed off Google engineers, who swore at the agency and immediately began speeding up the already-underway process of encrypting traffic flowing between data centers.
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Two of the biggest stories over the last year have been data protection and – of course – Edward Snowden’s revelations of massive spying by the NSA and GCHQ on all online activity in Europe (and elsewhere). As it happens, both of these important issues are coming to a head this week: after a preliminary debate tomorrow, on Wednesday the European Parliament will vote on both (draft agenda.) That means we still have time to drop them a friendly email today asking them to support strong privacy and civil liberties in Europe.
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Intelligence officials have long wanted a computerized system that could continuously monitor employees, in part to prevent cases similar to former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden. His disclosures bared secretive U.S. surveillance operations.
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The NSA defenders who label Ed Snowden a “traitor” (senators, congressmen and any number of former intelligence officials) often assert the whistleblower had an opportunity to use “proper channels” rather than take the route he chose: leaking documents to journalists.
War on Peace
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The terrible loss of life in the Malaysian air crash is tragic. But the attempt to ramp up a terrorism scare is ghoulish. We even had both the BBC and Sky speculating that it was the Uighurs. Now the suppression of Uighur culture and religion by the Chinese had been a great and long-term evil, and the West has been only too eager to shoehorn their story into the “Islamic terrorism” story. There is of course an enormous security industry, both government and private, which makes a very fat living out of “combating Islamic terrorism”, and a media which make a fat living out of helping to ramp it.
Covert Intervention/Spying
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Raviv reported that President Barack Obama would raise the assassination issue with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during their March 3rd meeting at the White House. The book also repeats previous claims that Israeli spies who were possibly drawn from Persian Jews who had emigrated to Israel had infiltrated Iran and, using a string of safe houses and some help from friendly Iranians, had managed to kill five scientists. The authors have added the new information about the White House talks, noting also that Netanyahu has already decided to end the program because of the risk to Israel’s “most talented and experienced spies,” choosing instead to focus Mossad efforts on proving that the Iranians are cheating on their nuclear program.
The motto of Israel’s foreign intelligence service the Mossad translates as “By way of deception you shall make war,” and one might modify that a bit to claim that “by way of deception you can sell books.” The whole story, intended to create some buzz for the new edition while at the same time touting the invincibility of Israeli intelligence, smells. It is the kind of narrative that is impossible to check. The sources are “secret,” Israel has never admitted its involvement, there is no indication that the president and prime minister actually spoke regarding the assassinations, and there is no suggestion why Obama would have any motive raise the issue. The Iranians are not demanding any action from Washington regarding the killings as part of the ongoing nuclear negotiations, so why would Obama even mention it?
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War, these movies taught me, is entered reluctantly and only after due, transparent discussion by the nation’s leaders. But as a child eating popcorn and tossing Jujubes from the balcony of the theater, I learned nothing about the imposition of freedom, of democracy, of American values on those who hold different values and beliefs and refuse to adopt what America “offers.”
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The chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein, on Tuesday accused the Central Intelligence Agency of a catalogue of cover-ups, intimidation and smears aimed at investigators probing its role in an “un-American and brutal” programme of post-9/11 detention and interrogation.
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According to the Associated Press, Sen. Feinstein said the CIA improperly searched a stand-alone computer network at the agency’s Langley, Virginia headquarters that was put in place so that Intelligence Committee staffers could view sensitive documents.
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The latest fight over America’s spycraft has triggered serious constitutional questions.
On the Senate floor Tuesday, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that the CIA searched computers used by Senate staff to investigate the CIA, confirming a story reported by the New York Times last week.
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A senior in Temple University’s journalism program helped break a recent national story that has members of the U.S. Senate pointing fingers at the CIA.
Ali Watkins, currently a 22-year-old intern for McClatchy in Washington, D.C., received a tip from sources who came to trust her while making herself a presence on Capitol Hill, according to a posting by Temple’s School of Media and Communications.
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Ongoing efforts to make public a report on torture perpetrated by the CIA has the spy agency “nearly at war” with its Senate overseers, Eli Lake reports in The Daily Beast. In theory, that would mean that the CIA is in deep trouble. Congress has the power to destroy the CIA if it desires. Congress could cut the CIA budget to zero! Yet the press is filled with stories about the CIA and its overseers written as if they are on equal footing, or even as if the CIA has the upper hand.
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Posted in Site News at 9:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Education
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Responding to student interest and a growing industry demand for workers with such skills, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is launching the nation’s first interdisciplinary minor in free and open source software and free culture.
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Responding to student interest and a growing industry demand for workers with such skills, Rochester Institute of Technology is launching the nation’s first interdisciplinary minor in free and open source software and free culture.
Starting in Fall 2014, RIT’s School of Interactive Games and Media will offer the minor in free and open source software (FOSS) and free culture for students who want to develop a deep understanding of the processes, practices, technologies, and financial, legal and societal impacts of the FOSS and free culture movements.
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With its continued focus on education, Google has launched Oppia (beta). The Open Source project is a free educational tool that lets anyone create online educational activities through the web interface. Interactivity is its strong suit. The interactive activities are called “explorations”.
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Whatever you may have heard about hackers, the truth is they do something really, really well: discover. Hackers are motivated, resourceful, and creative. They get deeply into how things work, to the point that they know how to take control of them and change them into something else. This lets them re-think even big ideas because they can really dig to the bottom of how things function.
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Schools in Romania are letting laptops gather dust, because the teachers don’t know how to use Linux, the Romanian TV station Pro TV reports. Last year, supermarket chain Profi donated laptops running the Edubuntu Linux distributions to schools. In at least one of these schools, the laptops are still in the box and other schools have replaced the software by proprietary alternatives.
Open Access
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The Tullahoma City School system has already made a considerable investment of time and energy into developing open source textbooks, and plans are in place to expand the program in the coming months.
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Joining a herd of other scientific societies, today AAAS (publisher of ScienceInsider) announced that it will launch the organization’s first online, fully open-access journal early next year. The new journal, called Science Advances, will give authors another outlet for papers that they are willing to pay to make immediately free to the public.
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Less than a week after AAAS, Science’s publisher, announced the launch of its first open-access online journal, Science Advances, Britain’s Royal Society has done the same. Royal Society Open Science, slated for launch later this year, will “provide a scalable publishing service, allowing the Society to publish all the high quality work it receives without the restrictions on scope, length or impact imposed by traditional journals,” a statement issued today says. The journal will cover life sciences, physical sciences, mathematics, engineering, and computer science.
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SEVEN MONTHS ago I showed that Elsevier “open access” CC-BY papers were incompetently labelled (see http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2013/08/12/elsevier-charges-to-read-openaccess-articles/ and following blog posts), and under “Rights and Permissions” charging huge amounts of money.
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Posted in Office Suites, OpenDocument at 9:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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All in all, this list would not significantly change the userbase of LibreOffice; but it would also position LibreOffice in places and circles where it’s not really used either, and I feel it’s a welcome set of suggestions that differ from the usual Android/iOS porting and cloud based office suite. On a deeper level, I think it also means that LibreOffice as a tool and office suites in general can change and grow to adapt to new usages even today.
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Less than one month after the release of the major LibreOffice 4.2 update, LibreOffice 4.2.1 has been released to ship a large number of fixes for discovered problems.
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The Document Foundation yesterday announced that the new Board of Directors is “officially in charge.” These new members were recently elected and congratulated last December and have been in a sort of training since. In other news, TDF today announced the release of LibreOffice 4.2.1 for early adopters, an update to 4.2 released January 30.
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There are a bunch of FLOSS office suites but two of them are the big dogs: LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice. “October 29th, someone downloaded the 75,000,000th copy of Apache OpenOffice™. The 75 million downloads have occurred in the less than 18th months since the first release of Apache OpenOffice on May 8th, 2012.
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LibreOffice has been pushing forward in its development recently with supporting OpenCL in its spreadsheet, gaining an OpenGL rendering back-end, and supporting other modern features and system capabilities for the open-source office suite. LibreOffice is also planning for its adoption of the C++11 programming language and even C++14 language features.
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The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.1.5 today, for all those running the 4.1 branch of code. In other news, a Pennsylvania high school has provided their students with Linux laptops and Lifehacker.com has outlined the top 10 uses for Linux. Also, www.networkworld.com has a slideshow of the 16 weirdest places running Linux and KDE was featured in hit movie Gravity.
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On Thursday the Document Foundation released its newest stable branch, LibreOffice 4,2. Don’t let be misled by its number; if we weren’t on a strict time released scheduled alongside a clear number scheme without any nickname for each release, I would have called this one the 5,0. Yes, you read that right, the mighty Five. Why? Mostly for two big reasons.
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Italo Vignoli of The Document Foundation today announced the immediate availability of the next major stable build of the popular office suite. LibreOffice 4.2 “features a large number of performance and interoperability improvements targeted to users of all kinds, but particularly appealing for power and enterprise users.”
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The Document Foundation’s newest release of LibreOffice 4.2 targets early adopters. It comes with many new performance and interoperability improvements for users of all kinds. Specifically, this update is designed to appeal to Windows power and enterprise users.
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A new stable, major release of the open-source LibreOffice suite is now available and with it comes several new and improved features.
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The initial work on an OpenGL rendering back-end has landed in LibreOffice, not too long after receiving OpenCL support for spreadsheets and OpenGL canvas support.
Pushed into Git today was the initial OpenGL rendering support, anti-aliasing support, a new time-based charting approach, OpenGL text rendering, OpenGL area rendering support, and other OpenGL-related changes.
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Open source office suite alternatives are well able to handle multiple languages. Apache OpenOffice for example, already supports 32 languages, and the upcoming new version will add several new languages, including Danish and Norwegian, according to a press statement from the Apache Software Foundation, released on International Mother Language Day, Thursday 20 February. Multilingualism is also a feature of LibreOffice, another open source office suite, localised in over a hundred languages.
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I bought a HiDPI laptop in October to replace my 5-year old Thinkpad. Between the 5.7 million pixels, and the bright LED backlight replacing my dying and dim CFL bulb, it makes the daily computing experience much easier on the eyes. I’d put up with a lot for this screen. It turns out I have to compared to my old Lenovo, as there is an incompatible and inferior keyboard layout, the Synaptics mouse drivers are flakey, it is difficult to replace the battery or hard drive, etc.
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Apparently, everyone is so busy delivering a new product, fostering a young community, paying down technical debt, making it run on Android, improving import and export, rewriting the Calc engine, removing Java, etc., that no one has time to make it look good on these beautiful screens. There is a lot happening without any rich benefactor anymore, and a split community. If you think LibreOffice is amazing, just imagine what it would be if IBM gave them $10M / year, and the trademark, and didn’t seduce away naïve volunteers and donations. (I believe if IBM were to ask Watson whether it should end the fork, the AI would recommend it. Watson is only being applied to customer problems instead of their own. One could spend a lot of time correcting the inaccurate FUD written on the AOO dev alias. Imagine we lived in a society that celebrated divorce instead of marriage.)
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When we first started the LibreOffice Project, we had a gazilion tasks to work on. Among them, we had priorities, most of them involving the code readiness of our first version, LibreOffice 3.3. Another priority was to make sure that the native-lang communities of the now defunct OpenOffice.org project would be able to find the tools needed to work on the releases, (re)create documentation, QA of their localized builds and several other important tasks. These were some of our most crucial priorities; yet among them, you would not have noted “design a nice website”.
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
OpenStack
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Every six months or so, a new release of the open-source OpenStack cloud platform debuts. The open-source release is followed by the stream of commercial vendors, including Piston Cloud Computing, that harden the upstream bits and enhance the platform with their own solutions.
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Or is it the case that 75,000 live OpenStack virtual machines can’t be wrong?
Gone are the days of benchmarking one Pentium processor performance compared to the last… and come to think of it, Apple has not pushed benchmarking as a key selling point in years and appears to be able to shift quite a few products.
Plus anyway, benchmarks are static metrics that fail to take into account an ongoing analysis of how a) hardware of any kind is used on a longer term basis and b) how real world data flows affect the software implementation being assessed.
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The OpenStack cloud computing platform continues to head in a lot of interesting directions. There are many IT departments interested in deploying it for its flexibility and customizability, but there are also those who simply want a well supported OpenStack platform that will let them take advantage of private cloud functionality.
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OpenStack remains a young cloud computing platform, but it’s becoming clear that we will see its compatibility with other technologies getting much better this year. As reported here, Mirantis is calling for and helping to build a standard, open set of tools that vendors can use to self-certify compatibility of their solutions with the upstream OpenStack codebase. This will help everything from drivers to APIs to become more friendly for those deploying OpenStack. Meanwhile, Red Hat and others are pursuing their own compatibility and certification-focused efforts.
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The way that IT certifications have long worked is that they have largely been vendor-specific. That’s something that is about to change with the open-source OpenStack cloud platform.
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OpenStack Object Storage (code named Swift) has a fairly frequent release schedule for improvements and new capabilities but naturally, there is always significant gravity around integrated releases for any OpenStack project. Even though the Havana release was very big for OpenStack Swift, with new support for global clusters, the upcoming Icehouse will be the biggest release yet for the OpenStack Swift project.
Other Initiatives
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The Cloud Foundry Foundation will be backed by ActiveState, CenturyLink, EMC, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Rackspace, SAP and VMware.
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IBM believes it’s making a safe bet by opening its middleware stack to its SoftLayer Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud. They’d better be. Big Blue’s putting a billion dollars on the table.
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Great Wide Open
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Like All Things Open, which is now an annual event, Great Wide Open is aimed at those who earn their living by plying their trades in the tech sector. In other words, don’t expect any workshops or presentations on “How to Setup Ubuntu for Grandma” here. However, this doesn’t mean there’ll be nothing for people who mainly use Linux and open source at home. Indeed, all FOSS supporters should look into enterprise events like this because what happens in the enterprise often eventually ends up on the desktop, either as improvements/additions to Linux or as new open source applications.
Linux Foundation Events
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The Internet of Everything, container virtualization and KVM virtualization for the OpenStack cloud are all on the list of open source initiatives the Linux Foundation will be highlighting at its Collaboration Summit next month, which provides some useful clues as to where the open source ecosystem is headed next.
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The Linux Foundation has announced the keynote speakers for ApacheCon and the CloudStack Collaboration Conference. ApacheCon takes place April 7-9, 2014 in Denver, Colorado. The CloudStack Collaboration Conference takes place April 9-11, 2014 in the same location. In particular, the CloudStack conference sounds like a very interesting event, and given all the hype about OpenStack, it’s easy to forget that CloudStack has momentum, too.
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SCALE 12X
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The primary goal of the conference was to encourage people to get involved with open source and to understand its power and its reach. We also wanted to help them get started by teaching them the basics and by getting them to know more about KDE. When the conference was over, it didn’t matter how many lines of code anyone could understand or even actually write. If some people were convinced of the magic of open source and of KDE, and are now willing to be contributors to this noble cause even if only slightly, then the event accomplished its aim. Events, speakers and mentors like these add fuel to the fire inside. Students were inspired to reach out and experience the power of free and open source technology.
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As my readers probably know there won’t be a combined release as the software compilation used to be. There are independent ongoing projects around the libraries (frameworks or KF5) the workspaces (Plasma Next) and the applications. These projects have independent release cycles and are not one product. I know, I know, many people will disagree and say that it’s still one. But if we go for this strong simplification both “will support Wayland” and “will not support Wayland” are true.
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Today I ported the ~7.5 year-old “services” KRunner plugin to Sprinter and added support for some of the new Sprinter features in the process, which I show in the video below. It felt like something of a milestone to have the first plugin I wrote for KRunner now running on libsprinter. 
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“Community” why is that more important than “Design”? Because it is design. It is the basis of Open Source Design. One of my favorite distros and desktops (aside from Plasma Desktop) is Crunchbang. It’s one of my first pure Linux Loves and will always have a certain place in my heart.Crunchbang got one huge chunk of design right: communication. Design is communication – it is not just “make pretty”, its the ability to communicate goals, ideals and ideas to a group. In Open Source the benefit we have is that everyone can be a part – we use it in almost every aspect, from the Kernel up to Widget programming. But we tend to forget Design because design have a myth about it of the “Lone Genius” and that “Design by committee” it’s supposed counterpart is somehow “bad for design”.
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It’s Christmas time for KDE Software users, the team has just announced the first beta of the 4.13 versions of Applications and Development Platform. This release also marks a freeze on APIs, dependencies and features so the team will now focus on hunting down bugs and polish it further.
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With these things in mind, I very quickly focused on two desktop managers that might provide the desired desktop: Xfce and Trinity. Since I prefer to use openSUSE as the underlying operating system and Xfce is one of the desktop manager options fully supported by openSUSE installations, Xfce was an obvious first choice for consideration. This article will consider the Xfce desktop manager from the perspective of a KDE4 user and it is addressed to all those KDE4 users who feel similarly frustrated with the development direction KDE4 has taken.
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Krita 2.8.0 was released yesterday, and this version comes with quite a big list of changes. In addition to the new features that were implemented, Krita is also available for Windows with an installer available from here.
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The KDE Project has released a major new version of its Krita image editing software, with the latest version of the free and open source Photoshop replacement available for both Windows and Linux.
The latest update, version 2.8, marks a significant milestone for the software, marking the first stable version of the software released for Windows.
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Krita 2.8 offers better tablet support based upon Qt’s tablet code, a new high-quality scaling mode for Krita’s OpenGL canvas, a new wrap-around mode, new brush presets, a layer picker, support for G’mic filters, and tons of new artist features and other improvements.
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The Calligra team is proud and pleased to announce the release of version 2.8 of the Calligra Suite, Calligra Active and the Calligra Office Engine. This version is the result of thousands of commits which provide new features, polishing of the user experience and bug fixes.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Ubuntu Gnome team wants to join the elite club of Ubuntu flavours which enjoy the LTS (Long Term Support) status. 14.04 is going to be an LTS release and its apt for Ubuntu Gnome team to get extended support of 2 years and 3 months as an LTS release which will make it easier for those users to use Gnome who want to use stable LTS releases.
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Several other minor improvements have been added to this release, and various bugs have been fixed, including the removal of the “Now Playing” entry from the App Menu, songs are no longer being replayed when they’re paused, the current track is now restarted when the Previous button is clicked, and the position is greater than 3 seconds.
Mixed
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The sleeper desktop environment – which I didn’t even considered years ago – has been XFCE. I’ve found that XFCE offers more robustness than say, LXDE, which lacks much of XFCE’s polish in its default configuration. XFCE provides all the benefits one may have enjoyed in GNOME 2, but with a lightweight experience that makes it a hit on older computers.
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Linux users do not like change. Well, actually, they do not like change for the sake of change. If something works, they typically hang on to it until something truly better comes along. A good example of this is GNOME 2. People love it and it works well. However, the GNOME Project moved to version 3 and radically changed how it works. GNOME purists were angry as version 2 worked just fine — for them. And so, many hung onto the outdated version, shunning version 3.
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