No, the ones who are paying for the energy are the people who live near whatever data centers received the slop requests.

Yeah, it confused me at first, but now I love it and never want to have to go back to dealing with Device Manager freaking out if I need to move a drive or swap out hardware.

Linux doesn’t have a Device Manager or database like Windows does. It automatically picks the appropriate drivers for the hardware in the system when it boots, based on what drivers are installed. And as others have mentioned, most distros ship generic kernels with all the open-source drivers included.

The issue is that the GNOME devs have made it VERY clear that they don’t want you doing this.

Ubuntu originally came out because Debian Sarge took much longer than usual to get released, and everything in Debian Woody was woefully out of date in 2004. KDE 3 and GNOME 2 had been out for a while but the latest Debian was shipping KDE 2.2.2 and GNOME 1.4. Ubuntu’s philosophy was to provide a more up-to-date distro for regular people.

I’ve been using Linux long enough that I used Debian Woody.

Yeah, and the GNOME team sees people using extensions, breaks them, and says “No, you WILL use it OUR way or else!”

Whenever I’ve tried GNOME, I’d say about 75% of the extensions I’ve seen recommended as recently as a year prior were now broken on the latest release. And apparently GNOME really hates the idea of a systray/AppIndicator even though most distros and users want it, other desktops have it, and Mac and Windows have it

Before Ubuntu existed, most distros aimed at newcomers shipped with KDE as the default. I’m not sure why Ubuntu went with GNOME as the default, but since Ubuntu came out, everything shifted to GNOME.

GNOME is definitely not going for a single UI that will please everyone. They’re going for a UI that you WILL use THEIR way, or else. And they WILL break any extensions you use within the next release or two. Which is an odd design philosophy for a desktop for an OS aimed at people who like to tweak.

I agree that KDE is better for newcomers. I’ll never understand why the newbie-friendly distros tend to favor GNOME.