When I first saw the donate button on Ubuntu download page, I went to archlinux and donated there, and used their iso instead.
Simply because their whole model switched to "we really need to make money now" instead of caring for the users, open source, ideals, etc.

It's the not the technical means that matter here. it's the way it's headed.
It will come a day, if that model keeps getting more support, where your Ubuntu will be far from "free and open" and just another android-like-for-the-desktop with some open source parts such as the kernel, and that's mostly it. (mind you, paid apps are closed source, tracking users is against privacy, etc)

"don't want to mess with all these new fangled thingies that will be obsolete or irrelevant in 1.7 years"

I can agree with that one. I can't be bothered to mess with crap that I know will fail and that every new kid on the block think its the new best thing since sliced bread.
Heck, I'm *that* old so I do look at them. It's just that the vast majority (yes, including those big fancy names) just plain suck, or have been already tried or invented.

Sometimes there's a good new thing but its more rare than one think. Listening to the youngsters, every 10 first posts of hackernews every day = OMG TOMORROWS NEW BOMB MUST USE IT EVERYWHERE WITHOUT THINKING !

Well yeah, I'm too old for that shit =)

No commercial interest.

I'm hoping they will not modify current notifications in a bad way. current ones are useful for regular desktop use. I'm sure they're not as useful for FB, twitter announces and that sort of crap and it seems to be what they want to fix.

The stuff nerds like me don't give a rat's ass about.

The latest problem has been Flash.
Adobe released a version of flash that managed to freeze firefox. Except everyone will think "its a firefox issue". They took forever to fix it.
In a way, they're right - this happens ONLY with firefox. IE and Chrome gets "special versions". I'd almost go with a conspiracy theory here sometimes.

Unfortunate.

It's "funny" how "the law" can stop and break down anyone without any consequence. By the law I of course mean the ones with power and money. You go against them, you'll die or everything will be taken from you including your freedom, til you eventually wish you die.

It's unfair, yet what can we do, what do we do? Nothing.

Because ... wait for it .... applications not behaving properly during updates and figuring out what to do is NOT the expected behavior for non-technical end users?

No. It doesn't work.

If you keep stuff in ram it will take more ram. It you load when needed, it will break if you update without restart.

Besides, for servers, if the configuration changes and is reread, it will fail too.

In fact, many upgrade mechanisms actually *restart* the daemons after upgrade. It's just that you can't restart GUI apps without breaking stuff for the user.

That even includes xorg.

it's more effort, thats why people use SPDY.
Changing all the gear to support SCTP is hard. Specially those pesky hp/cisco/juniper/you-name-it proprietary network hardware

That's also why Google is sometimes pushing for open source software on top of network hardware IMO.

Maybe they finally figured out that for the medium and longer term its better to actually please and fight for the customers.

But then again, I'm probably wrong.

It's not really about that tho, it's about being able to joke without being arrested.
Imma kill all presidents of the world!
then next morning im arrested. that .. doesn't make any sense.

and then we get history lessons about how 200 years ago people got jailed, fined, and/or killed for a yes or no from more powerful people.
it didn't change all that much.

To be honest Windows is reasonably user friendly.
That's a little too typical maybe but my mum has been a mac user all her life. shes uses OSX. She's always asking me simple stuff like where the preferences for an app is gone (yeah, preferences are always in the same menu, but hey, it's mum)

I put her in front of Windows 7 a couple of times and she does just fine. She'd ask where the option menu is from time to time but that's it. She even says she likes it. The UI is faster and the menus attached to windows are less confusing. (she finds the start menu confusing, but once she got it it was fine)

So yeah. Reasonably user friendly IMO.

That's not entirely true. Securing Linux with the tools you mention, while not extremely hard, ain't easy. Mr joe-webdev won't understand *anything* of it and he's usually the one to decide (oh yeah!)

Apart from that, sex and food what else motivates humanity?

Making money (which seems to be what *everyone* wants to do) is just to get more food, and sex time anyways. Oh and moon bases, ferraris, whatever.
So yeah. Good enough for me