This submission is the worst linux submission I've ever seen on Slashdot. Period. Sensationalist spam at its worst.

I've been using 12.04 since launch on two computers, one a fresh install and the other upgraded from a pervious version. No problems at all like those described in the article.

Back with 10.04, there was a kernel bug that would make the system crash on my laptop with the num and caps lock keys blinking on and off. Was 10.04 a disaster? No, that's ridiculous. They fixed it in an update (for me it was via 10.10 but I later learned they also backported the fix to 10.04 as it is an LTS release).

Full disclosure: I manage the project I am about to propose your use of. CentOS and its upstream RHEL6 is great on the desktop and I too feel that going from Fedora to RHEL there are just way too many things I miss. I also hated everything Gnome was doing with gnome-shell and gtk3. So I made a fork of RHEL6 that had everything I needed (an OpenVZ compatible kernel), dahdi packages via rpm, proprietary Nvidia packages and something that offered the functionality of EPEL/RPMForge/ELRepo/rpmfusion without them breaking each other through dependencies. We use it as the foundation of our cloud voip platform on our servers but also use it on our workstations so we can easily build and deploy virtual containers. It's called CCT Enterprise Linux (http://www.classiccitytelco.com/?page_id=488) and has most packages from EPEL, gstreamer*ugly functionality, and nvidia drivers for CUDA developers or those that just want functional OpenGL support. It sounds like we ran into the same problems, so hopefully the solution I spent some time on putting together might help you out. If you install it and wonder where all the extra packages are, remember to enable cct-extras and cct-nonfree. That's where all of the non-RHEL packages live. Hope that helps you out, but if you prefer Fedora and Mate, I completely understand.

it's time to go out and get 20 crates of orange soda to celebrate

I am a long time Amazon customer but when it came time to choose a multimedia ebook reader, the Nook Color was just the best deal for me. And to make it more attractive, it's easy to through android on there (though I prefer the stock firmware) and has the ability to let you increase the storage space via a microsd card. It's a great value and I've loved it so far. I heard about this new Amazon device and got excited that I might be able to do all the things I love from the nook, but now with Amazon. But no epub support, no microsd slot expansion, no thanks.

this reminds me of a skit eddie izzard did. Kirk: "Scotty, we need warp 9 in 5 seconds or we're all dead!" Scotty: "I can give you 30mph in a week or two, captain..."