... that make we want to throw up my hands and just say frack it all to Linux, period. I've been working with Linux since 1998, and from the beginning, it's been whining, backbiting, complaining, dissing, bickering, moral posturing, and in general one big ball of negativity. The vast (vast) majority of it is ill-informed fanboi nonsense.

Use what you want, work on what you want to contribute to, but holy moly can we please stop tearing down everything and anything that doesn't meet our personal code of free-open-source-grooviness?

I sometimes think that demands for ideological purity is going to be the death of Free Software...

With all due respect, I understand what you've said. When I employed the term 'politics' I was using it in the broadest possible sense, over the many years I've been using Linux.

I don't care about any of the bickering that goes on, until it becomes public and makes an ass out of all involved. I understand how humans operate, and how the sausage is made.

But kindly don't be telling me to "get over it". FL/OSS is about a lot more than just basing one's decisions on technical merit alone. There's trying to have an understand of trends and reliability and this kind of bullshit is really not useful.

... I don't want anything more to do with Canonical, or Ubuntu, or Mint, or any of that lot. I'm sticking with Debian. I'm sure it has its problems and all, but at least the politics seem to remain mostly internal. These public pissing matches between distros just seem so counter-productive. But since I've been using Linux (1998), it seems to be a constant. Ego issues? I don't know. I don't particularly care. It's just so boring and off-putting.

Time is NOT arbitrary. Noon should be close to when the Sun is on the meridian. I don't have time [sic] to read the 350 comments on this article, but I hope someone made the point. We have already yielded so much up to "commerce". NOT time. Fuck commerce. The economy exists to serve human wants and needs. Humans do not exist to serve the economy. This article is absurd and disgusting.

I guess one of my points is that I don't believe there is a "we, the FOSS community". I used to think so, but now there seems to be nothing but a swarm of multiple contingents jockeying for position to further their project, and dumping on the other projects. I suppose it was ever thus, really. In any case, it guarantees that FOSS goes nowhere.

Discouraged, yes. Though I just installed the latest Ubuntu and this stuff was opt-in, so perhaps the cries were heard. My point is that to award this distinction to Ubuntu in the face of all the crap going down on the Internet is simply absurd, extremely small potatoes, and smacks of sour grapes and/or piling on, which is the norm for the FOSS press.

What's popular isn't always "right" (who decides that?), but we really might maintain a sense of proportion. In over 15 years of observing the FOSS world, it really seems that if you start to get any traction in the wider world, the "community" (as if there were a "community") seems to want to smack it down. For all the talk of world domination and so on and so forth, the "community" seems on some visceral level to want to remain marginal, They are getting their wish.

You don't understand...

Ubuntu was threatening to be successful in the wider market. Therefore, it must be taken down at any cost! Once again, the FOSS "community" (gack!) eats its young.

This sort of nonsense is why Linux "market share" will never get anywhwere.

That is a good question. In the US, most coffemakers are graduated such that a cup is 6 US ounces (an official cup being 8 ounces). I drink 2 good-sized mugs of coffee every morning, which is about 4 coffeemaker cups, so about 3 official cups.

But I am over 55, so I have nothing to worry about. :-)

Thank the godz I'm over 55!

Fucking savages.

There, someone had to say it.

How utterly pathetic.

Let's just face it, here in Linux Land, if any distro achieves a measure of success, we just hate it! It is as night follows day.

The majority of the hate-posts here betray a deep lack of knowledge of what's going on with Ubuntu. All they know is that it's cool to hate Ubuntu, good for your geek cred.

This is nothing new with Ubuntu - it's been true since the dawn of Linux and distros. I'm not sure why it is, but it's appears to be some basic human social-driven flaw.

Ubuntu has done a helluva lot for Linux, and people who don't understand that haven't been using Linux for very long. They claim to want Linux to "succeed", but as soon as it begins to, they pile on. Because it's not exactly what THEY want. It's pathetic, disgusting, and discouraging.

I would hope that driving with this thing would be prohibited at its release.

China has been growing in economic and military influence, and seems to want to be taken seriously. If that is the case, this is their moment. They could put an end to this nonsense in a minute. They need to understand that it would be in their own national interest to smack this puppy on the snout, fast and sharp. If they just let it fester, and it leads to armed conflict, they will lose face.

There are just so many ways that this can go wrong...

Right, move to Mint, a parasite of Ubuntu.

Just use Ubuntu with a different UI - I use and like Gnome Shell, but there's XFCE, KDE, etc., etc.