That's fine, there's no problem with discussion. Just don't expect me to agree with everything, that's all.

It can be taken to either extreme. If you take a stance against every tool that you might use for your living because of ideological considerations, then you might as well not live. I mean, how many components in the hardware of your computer is made in sweat shop factories in China where workers are exploited? Probably every single device has one of those. The clothes that you wear -- how many of them are produced in similarly unethical environments?  The monetary system we use -- how many people have been exploited in the course of its development?  The house you live in, likely built by underpaid overworked workers exploited because they had the misfortune of being illegal immigrants desperate to find any job to make ends meet. The roads we drive on, swept by underpaid exploited workers who are forced to take jobs local people deem below their dignity to take. The banking system that's used to exploit the masses in order to maximize profits. Etc, etc, etc, ad nauseaum.

Pretty much every aspect of modern life is associated with something unsavory, whether in its current incarnation or in its origins.  I guess the ethical thing to do is to renounce it all and go live on shrubs and herbs in a mountain cave, far removed from all of this evil.

At some point, one has to draw the line of practicality.  I hate exploitation as much as anyone might, but given the choice of getting my daily chore done right now, using "unethical" things like google search, vs spending hours to make up for the technological gap with alternative search engines -- hours which I could have spent doing more profitable things like helping refugees from war-torn countries, for instance -- is it really worth the ideological purity?

I'm glad to be of entertainment value to you.

I mean it, though. The search function of most forum software is garbage.  Doing a site-specific search on $(insert search engine of your choice) is so much better.

As far as search engines are concerned, it seems google search is hated here for whatever reason. But none of the competitors even come close IMO.  (Yes, you may throw the rotten tomatoes now.)

I just edit .xsession to start applications upon login.   And ratpoison is competely keyboard-driven (this is programmable too).

Basically, I find no need of overlapping windows: usually I'm working with one application, so it makes sense to just maximize it to make use of the entire screen real estate.  Occasionally I need to work with two applications at the same time; then I just need to split the screen in half and tile the two applications side-by-side.  Ratpoison does both.

I also have no need for eye-candy: window borders are redundant, so are title bars and backgrounds. So a WM that dispenses with these unnecessary things is a plus.

Furthermore, I prefer to keep my hands on the keyboard at all times if at all possible -- it's faster that way than having to keep switching between keyboard and mouse.  Ratpoison is fully controlled by keyboard: switching between windows, closing a window, launching a console, etc., are all powered by just a couple of keystrokes. So there's no need for the rodent.  Bonus: ratpoison has a dedicated keystroke sequence just for banishing the rat cursor to the lower right corner of the screen, where it's mostly invisible and out of the way.

I also have no need of taskbars or any permanent fixture on the screen: if I wanted the time, for example, a 2-keystroke sequence tells me the time, there's no need to dedicate screen real estate to that. Similarly with listing the currently open windows, etc., etc..  Ratpoison provides no taskbars or any other such fixture; they are all accessible by keystrokes and go away on their own so that they don't bother me all the time. Check.

So basically, Ratpoison lets me focus 100% on the current application with 100% of the screen real estate. Window management is 100% in the background, as it ought to be. There is no desktop, there's only actual applications.  This is perfection.

//

The only time I need a mouse these days is to use that annoyance of a web browser.  Thankfully, there's addons like Vimperator and Tridactyl that, for the most part, eliminates the need for the rodent and returns control to the keyboard.  This lets me reduce rodent use to less than 1% of the time, which are the only times when there's a legitimate need of a pointer: selecting some text on the screen, for example, or drawing stuff in a paint app. (In theory it is possible to be rodent-free even in these circumstances, but here the rat pointer is actually more efficient than the alternatives, so it redeems its existence on my desk.   Otherwise I wouldn't even have a rat at all.)

OK, sorry for wrongly assuming that this forum is based on phpBB.  I don't like google either, but I've not found a search engine that can match its results.  Privacy buffs clamor around DuckDuckGo, but frankly its search results are lackluster.  In any case, the internal search functions of just about all forum software are grossly disappointing. They are unable to handle anything beyond the simplest, most literal search words, and do not even begin to grok context and relevance. Unless you already know the literal keyword(s) to search for, they are no help at all.  For a *real* search function, most 3rd party search engines outperform built-in search functions by a large margin, and google tops the list, like it or not.  I'm saying this based on the technical performance of the google search engine, not about their Other Practices which I do not agree with nor endorse. There is a difference.

To each his on, I guess. I never really bought into the whole "desktop metaphor" thing, and I use Ratpoison because it gets rid of overlapping windows, window deco, panels, bars, borders, and all of that fluff, and gives 100% of screen real estate to your application. Everything is keyboard-driven and the rodent can be put back in the hole where it belongs.   Essentially it's a glorified graphical incarnation of the text console, and I like it that way.

(There's tiling too, for those rare occasions when I actually need to use two applications at once. But generally it just gives 100% of the screen real estate to a single application. Gets rid of all sorts of needless complexity that only serves to complicate my life or add eye candy that I don't care for.)

Windows boot times on a laptop are generally short because it's usually hibernated rather than fully shutdown.  If you do a full shutdown and cold restart, you will probably see significantly longer load times.

Linux also has a hibernation feature merged in, IIRC, but last time I checked, the implementation is iffy because it only saves the OS state, not the current state of hardware devices. So once it comes back up, device drivers might get into the wrong state because the hardware isn't in the expected state from when the system was last hibernated.  That was years ago, though, I don't know if the situation has improved since.

These days I find all desktops bloated, and can only stand using Ratpoison. 😉

To me, Windows sux for much the same reasons as Wayland, systemd, and other similar software. It's not so much the software itself that's so objectionable, but the philosophy behind it. The philosophy of upstream shoving their decisions down your throat, whether you like it or not. The walled garden philosophy that we're the best, and if you don't agree with us you're left out in the cold, and can go rot in hell for all we care. Compatibility? Interoperability? Not in our dictionary. Customizability? Don't even think about it.  If it breaks you get to keep both pieces. It's our way or the highway. Your use case doesn't matter cuz it doesn't exist as far as our walled garden is concerned. Choice? What's that? There is no choice except what we already chose for you.

I switched to Linux cold turkey from the MSDOS/Windows world in the 90's for this very reason, and never looked back since. It's very sad to see how today Linux is also heading in that direction, no thanks to the agenda of certain persons. Very glad to have found Devuan where I can get away from that nonsense once again.

I'm not disagreeing with you.   I'm just saying that even if wayland specifies a protocol for copy-n-pasting, it would still be up to the relevant applications to implement it in a sane way before it would work. If one of the authors is lazy and decides to just ignore it, or implement it minimally (i.e., copy always returns an empty string) then you'd still get nowhere.

As someone once said,

Supposedly by Napoleon, according to my sources, but I was told that's a misattribution. Unfortunately I forgot the name of the "real" author.