German City Set To Make Linux A Norm For Citizens

That is exactly the WRONG question. Government power & influence needs to be restricted to the bare minimum necessary - for the security(!) of its citizen.

We can all clearly see what extensive government power leads to. Just wait for the HN front page to be flooded again with reports about Snowden/PRISM.

There are certain tasks that should be put in the hands of the government (ensuring the rule of law, national defense, making sure free elections happen) and others that have a good ROI (education / healthcare). But beyond that, it is just more power to the wrong institution.

Going completely 1984 here: Today they distribute Linux, tomorrow they distribute Linux with a Rootkit pre-installed.

Regarding UI changes: Boy... I hate those. 20 years of Moore's law have left us with incredibly powerful computers and we manage to waste all that raw power, those billions of CPU cycles per second on fancy UI. You are completely right - from a technical, educated standpoint.

BUT, that's not how the human brain works. For your average consumer the rule of thumb is "if it looks fresh, it is fresh". Plain & simple. They don't "get" that NTFS now supports transactions and that atomicity in file operations is like the holy grail and just completely awesome - but "Oh boy! That start button with lights up when I move the mouse over it!!!!"

Tell you what: Microsoft has that shit figured out - at least with every other version ;-)

(Likely this is left over from tabs I have closed)

I think it's just general overhead, since I have similar figures when starting FF fresh with no tabs.

If you look at "window-objects" under explicit allocations, you can see the memory for individual pages; the page of your parent comment weighs 2.2 MB for me.

But that's without history... when you click links, it will keep the previous pages cached, and I think that is what can really eat a lot of memory real quick. But I would also hope that memory gets released without much of a fuss? I don't know that, but if the RAM is made available when system resources get low, I'd say cache away, since unused RAM just eats electricity for nothing :P

Why Linux? Because coding (web stuff) on Windows sucks. Expandrive hasn't been working that well for me, makes explorer sluggish, etc.

Of course I didn't replace Windows - Ubuntu suggests you to install it along Windows (that part works really well these days).

See, the other day someone posted on HN that their Unity experience was bad because they had used a slow computer; I bought that idea and tried on the PC this time. (Then I went to XFCE, as usual. Which also failed on me, as I mentioned about the USB drive problem).

I should have videotaped myself installing and using Ubuntu - its just dozens of tiny UX mistakes that make me mad.

The problem is that everything has to work really well for a "power user" to use a computer happily. I can't believe someone that says the experience/aesthetics of Ubuntu matches that of OSX.

I absolutely don't want anyone to help me solve the problems (they were examples, there were dozens)[1] which you consider imaginary - my algorithm regarding Linux on the Desktop is to come back every 6 months and try it again).

(BTW, VLC works very well, I meant web based videos.)

[1] Small example: When I clicked "Install" on Synaptic, the button state didn't change until several seconds had passed, then the box asking for the root password pops up. By that time, I had already clicked it again several times.

Firefox is lighter on the RAM usage these days especially with more tabs because of the sandboxing.