Linux has provided some epic rants

Yes, but I don't think a rant about a device driver setup routine returing -EBUSY as opposed to -EINVAL would appeal to the general public.

...when ill thought out laws are passed.

In the UK, it is a crime (under the computer misuse act) to test a 3rd party system for vulnerabilities.

The Heartbleed incident caused a lot of people to break the law testing whether websites were affected.

The Radeon driver is under MIT, not GPL.

Seems AMD have taken on-board what Nvidia chose to ignore.
Being the advice offered by the Kernel devs

http://lists.linux-foundation....

If I don't know for sure, I won't do it. I'm going to gamble with my filesystem, am I?

Does windows still not have a journaling filesystem?
Blimey...

I don't know, really.
I've played stuff before (point & click adventure games) where you're dropped into a world with no knowledge of anything and expected to get a certain way through before any kind of plot exposition.

and it's not like the game was silent - I had everything except the vocals.

anyway...

I have to say, I loved Portal 1
So when Portal 2 was released in beta for Linux, I downloaded and played it immediately.

Having not played it before (last time I used windows was 1998)
I had no idea what the game should have been like.

Portal 1 was fairly sparse on the dialog front
"We regret to inform you that.....eeee...." lights flicker
So I didn't think much of it when Portal 2 was light on dialog

Played through to chapter 4 before I realised that there haven't been any dialog
Bug report here (no apparently fixed)
https://github.com/ValveSoftwa...

The curse of the Linux-only gamer....

Ps. I've enjoyed the game so far, even sans vocals

It sounds like Canonical are just a bunch of a**holes.

How is this any different to what Mozilla or Redhat do?

It's brand protection.
They don't want some shody fork that's poorly designed to use their trademarked name and possibly impacting their reputation.

Billuntu - Packed with malware
Jilluntu - It wipes your disk without confirmation

1) Relabel Windows 7 boxes "Windows 9"

Fixed that for you

Yes, and journeys in early motorised carriages could have been done quicker and cheaper using horses.
Not very good at the old forward-thinking thing, are you ;)

I think the main reason comes down to binary drivers

Ok, this is at least a valid reason.

I do find it very odd, to say the least, that Canonical is being criticised though.
The criticism should be levelled at the hardware vendors who won't provide open drivers.

I just find it an odd state of affairs when a non-copyleft project (Wayland) is favoured over a copyleft project (Mir) because of proprietary drivers.

Why are we limiting ourselves because of proprietary drivers?
It's all backward.

Anyway...

Because the userbase for Ubuntu is quite huge comparatively, and Ubuntu seems to like doing shit like this "just because" without any reasoning grounded in fact or reality.

Sorry, I don't understand the comment.
Isn't Doing shit, "just because" a fundamental part of OSS software development?
Do you want to remove the "scratch your own itch" element?

Quick google says that Mir is GPL V3
What exactly is the issue here?
I'm missing something...

Gentoo user here, just to side-step any Ubuntu fanboy responses.

Why are two competing display server stacks considered a problem in this case?

Over the years we've had countless situations like this
The various desktop environments, package management systems, initialisation systems, boot loaders, audio stacks, etc. etc.

Often seen as the benefit of open-source software.
The ability for multiple software components to exist that fulfil the same function. May the best man win.

Innovation and progress comes from each project trying to out-do it's rivals.

Often these competing solutions have a single distro or company behind them, driving development forward.

Why is Ubuntu's new display server, competing against X.org and Wayland any different?

Torvald's comments to Nvidia were to do with Optimus (their GPU switching stuff), not their closed graphics driver