See also time & space - a Lua interpreter starts about 3-10x as fast as Python, and takes 1100k of RAM to Python's 4M. This matters on a small machine like a Raspberry Pi.
Right now I'm on Arch Linux because it feels like a good balance of bleeding edge packages/flexibility/power-user elitism (meaning it caters to my desires as a software engineer), and large installed base causing there to be packages or some other support for most things (e.g. there's a PKGBUILD available that bends Valve's .deb distribution of Steam into a Pacman (Arch's package manager) package).
Rather than post a wall of text about the advantages I get, I'll link to a talk on the subject I recently did: http://lsh.io/plugtalk
The two big problems I find with non-Linux OSes are 1. lack of a good POSIX-style userspace or sufficient OS features to install one; and 2. welded-on, monolithic GUI layers - MacOS and Android are both nonstarters for me because they force me to use their very inflexible, very badly designed window managers (among other issues, but that's the one that's really unfixable due to the fundamental design on both OSes).
It does indeed do ellipses - just pass a falsey value for forceAspect in the constructor options and it will let you select an arbitrary ellipse. You can also pass a float value for forceAspect to get that aspect ratio (e.g. 1.777 = = 16:9 TV screen).
Not everyone is interested in taking the time to make themselves a whole meal every day. I know I'm not: I don't derive a lot of pleasure from food of any kind beyond a limited amount from a very small selection of specific food items. As a result, I find myself more, not less, aware of the effect my eating habits have on my health. If I could away with it, I'd eat McDonald's for every meal not because I find it to be some pinnacle of culinary superstimuli but because it's that much easier. I don't, because the health and mental effects of eating fast food much more than once a week are immediately obvious (to say nothing of the probable long term issues).
Food is a deep topic with really excellent geeking out potential, but it's not something I'm interested in reprioritising my life over in the way you suggest. To put it in an HN friendly metaphor, people like me are eagerly awaiting things like these squares or Soylent for the same reason Apple has been able to so hugely disrupt and capture the smartphone market: no one is selling a good experience to the people who aren't interested in revolving their life around the topic.
So yes, I can do better. I can shotgun a litre of Soylent and spend the extra time wandering foggy seashores with my wife, or tweaking up my RC airplanes, or working on something opensource. Not everyone wants to be a food geek anymore than you're going to convince your grandma to switch to Linux and then care what bootloader she's using (syslinux FTW!).
I have similar feelings to you about the fiddliness of games based on life. A few years back, it inspired me to build this as an experiment in unfiddly GoL play: https://github.com/lharding/The-Automataic-Gardner
(warning: Processing. Been meaning to port it to JS forever now.)
As everyone else is saying, it's still a pretty uncrowded namespace and the 'IO as in input/output' thing is great for B2D or D2D sites. More concretely, it's a way for me to have a personal site whose domain is 6 characters, all of which mean something (http://lsh.io, my initials and "input/output").
Thread derail: I just bought that domain recently. What's the MVP for an engineer's personal site?
I second/third/47th the recommendations for Thinkpads. Everything people say here regarding graphics drivers is true, unfortunately.
You will have problems with pulseaudio hosing video playback timing and a host of other stuff if you run Ubuntu. My solution is to just remove pulseaudio entirely, which forces me to use an alsa-based volume widget, but that's pretty trivial and the hard volume keys work out of the box.
If you get thermal issues, pull the machine apart and make sure the heatsink is applied correctly - on my T400 there was a serial # sticker over one edge of the CPU die that was holding the heatsink away from the die. Also, the cooling air intakes have filters that get dirty easily and make a massive difference to cooling efficiency (the fan isn't just pulling air from inside the case as things appear).
As for keyboards, the keyboard on my T400 is my favorite on any computing device I have right now. The layout on the W520 my employer provided is the same as the T400, which is basically the same as it's been forever, but the keyfeel is a lot more rubber-dome-y than the T400 which feels highly mechanical.
The other thing I'll say for Thinkpads is that after a few years of maintaining my wife's laptops, I was pleasantly surprised on opening up my T400 to clean out it's heatsink that Lenovo's engineers actually didn't hate me and want me to die as is the case with other, fruitier manufacturers. There's still a good bit of "remove WXYZ to get at A", but these are much more maintainable machines than typical.