They sold MaxDB to MySQL, who open sourced it. After MySQL and various contributors improved MaxDB to the point where it was useful, they bought it back and immediately closed the source. Those are pretty clearly the actions of a ardent foe of open source.

Even with better typography support, Word is still unsuitable for anything more complex than a letter to Grandma. That's because it still makes it harder to create structured documents than LaTeX does. If I'm writing a novel or a paper or something, the ability to simply say "\chapter{In Which I Make A Fool of Myself on Slashdot}" is MUCH easier than mucking with the mess that is Word's half-baked paragraph styles. The only thing Word does better than LaTeX is pictures.

So far, the "netowrk auto-magic shit" to which you refer, has served me quite well. Maybe you should turn it off for servers, but if you're connecting through a wireless card, it seems to work quite well. Better than NetworkManager on Linux, I would even venture.

I'm typing this from OpenSolaris 2008.11 and I'm actually surprised how "desktop-friendly" Solaris has actually become. The default GNOME-based desktop is gorgeous and works well. Hardware support may not be all that broad, but when hardware is supported it's REALLY supported: even booting off the live CD, my Atheros wireless card, NVidia 3D card and crappy on-mobo sound were "auto-magically" detected and set up. Performance is also quite snappy, even on my aging Athlon XP 3000+ with a measly 1 GB of RAM. In short, OpenSolaris is more than up to the task of working on Toshiba's new laptops.

If VIA offered an IGP that didn't get blown out of the water by even a crappy old Intel GMA950...