@Pilot6 alright I guess "sad" was not the best word choice. :D My point was that I basically agree with you.

@Pilot6 I don't know if this makes you any less sad, but I am getting used to see my flags declined myself. It seems that the (good) intention to be friendly on AU is skewing toward accepting any kind of poor answer, sometimes.

@Seth but that would be abusing the NAA definition. A link only answer is an answer, although of terrible quality.

Wrong tag on the second comment. :)

@JacobVlijm I usually do not downvote, nevertheless I am not in principle against downvotes if they are accompanied by a motivation that helps the user understand. Regarding your question, downvotes on meta have a different purpose than on other sites. They mean "I disagree with your idea". Currently two users disagree with your proposal. Since I partially agree, I will neither upvote nor downvote it. :)

I would rather say "try avoiding downvotes without comments".

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Now that I think about it, the example I posted maybe was from a user on SuperUser rather than StackOverflow, however he was also active on SO. Nevertheless, the gist of my answer remains the same.

«Only kernels are operating systems» I am not sure you meant to write this. ;) Did you mean that Linux is a kernel thus only a component of an OS?

@muru thanks for pointing that out. I also use "they" most of the time. Anyway, I guess I opened an OT here... sorry. :)

@Seth, don't worry. It happens so many times. :D Andros in greek is the literal word for "man", I still don't understand how it became a female name but well, it sometimes is even here. :) I asked because I definitely recall some CS books (even Tanenbaum's Computer Networks IIRC) where a generic "user" was always referred as "she" so I though it could be a standard choice. Thanks for your appreciation of my English.

@Seth Thank you. I am not a native speaker, I guess "her" is an impersonal pronoun, right?