@Arsnof: Or, as it's usually said: what does not kill you makes you stronger.

@Squiddles: Personally, I find the compose sequences easier to both use and remember, but that's only part of the point. Ctrl-shift-u is a feature of Gtk, not X, so not all programs use it. Some examples that don't: wine, xterm, and any app made with Qt (e.g. LyX, the VirtualBox front-end, Calibre, all of KDE).

@brianary: The sequence for ‽ is compose ! ? or compose ? !. That list isn't complete, but it's the most complete one I could find in a readable format.

Wow, I didn't expect the tip to end up as its own article. I just thought it might make a nice tips box addition.

@cynvision: Yeah, I see how it can be appealing if you don't have the environment set up that way already.

@Dr.Preston!: I knew hat you meant about that, don't worry. I was trying to explain why I prefer wine to win7 for gaming and it ended up in similar conversation territory, that's all. Coincidence :)

@LeftClicker: Not sure what tip you mean, but the way I do it is through konsole's fullscreen mode. No hacking or mucking about with anything that way, and as a bonus I can use shell profiles to change things to be more convenient for the task. Set a profile to use a proportional UTF-8 font and it solves the…

@cynvision: Best way to deal with the outside distractions is to disable all the notifications. I don't need a text app to do handle that for me, it's already a way of life on my computer. I hate apps demanding my attention, regardless of whether I'm trying to be productive or not, so I always turn off audio cues,…

Seems like all five choices are basically the same app with different names. Kind of a disappointing hive five, not that that's Lifehacker's fault. It just means there isn't much variety in this category, I guess.

@TheFu: That's exactly what I was thinking. I guess there's nothing to prevent that sort of thing, then? Not surprised, but I wasn't sure.

@Method320: Basically how TheFu said - if all you can see is the socket, how do you know it's a USB stick until you plug it in? By then the damage could already be done.

I wonder how long it will be before someone does something creatively nasty, such as wiring the plug up to the building's electrical lines. Does USB even have safeguards to prevent something like that from ruining the hardware?

@Dr.Preston!: Yep, Javascript. It's mentioned here as a way of dispelling fear about Mono dependencies. Ironic, considering Javascript dependency worries me more than Mono. You could grab the source to see how extensive it is, but even if you don't, this screenshot from the Gnome Shell tour shows it.

@Dr.Preston!: That's the situation I was in for a long time, but eventually random gripes started pushing me away from Windows. Last straw was when my old PC died and I tried putting XP on this one. It gave me so much trouble I just gave up on installing it at all, and lived Linux-only for a year or so.

@Dr.Preston!: Rekonq - I agree, I can't even get it to run on Debian. It breaks and eats 100% cpu on a single core on startup for some reason. It's not a KDE default, I don't think: that's Kubuntu brain damage.

If your an iOS user, - should be you're

@Dr.Preston!: KDE feels bigger because it makes more of itself visible to the user than GNOME does. Think of it like cleaning your bedroom: stuffing everything into your closet doesn't mean you have less stuff, it just makes people think you do.

@bdinger: A quick google.com/linux search gave me this: [forums.linux-foundation.org]

@bdinger: My only recent experience with Linux printing is with an HP printer and it seems to be just as fast as printing from Windows 7, so it's apparently not a universal issue.

@Jason Fitzpatrick: You're a lot luckier than I am, apparently. If something has failure problems I'm usually one of the unfortunate ones. I was able to salvage most of the data from the failing SparQ drive, but not all of it.