I thought Microsoft removed desktop Windows from Dreamspark? It's not quite what MSDNAA used to be.

Except we know exactly to expect from Sun/Oracle, the OpenIndiana folks, the FreeBSD, and the OpenBSD folks. Linux devs randomly decide they're going to replace something and call everyone who might who questions them an idiot. And guess what? Red Hat, Debian, and Canonical only support what they ship with their OS as well. You know what we don't have in the other groups? Random splintering and decisions designed to fracture the community.

You mean like RH prior to RHEL 7? Or how about Slackware? Gentoo? Ubuntu LTS? Plenty of distros exist[ed] without systemd and didn't suck. What Red Hat and the systemd crowd doesn't want to here is that most users that care do not want systemd. Most users have no opinion one way or another. Most that do care were perfectly content with the old system and saw much bigger problems in the Linux world that fighting over replacing init takes time away from. If we really needed a new init system, then why not adopt launchd, SMF (which systemd wishes it was), or upstart, and focus on issues that actually matter? Instead, Linux is losing long time supporters and is fracturing itself.

But not anymore. Even Slackware has helpers, with Patrick getting the final say.

You sound like a Fedora user.

To date I've found that KDE has always had the best multimoniter support. And aside from not being able to set a per-screen background, what's wrong with GNOME's support?

Maybe. Or maybe some of us are moving away from Linux because of too many "my way or the highway" type developers and unfinished crap getting shoved down people's throats. *BSD and Solaris 11 run just fine on my laptop (and my home servers are Solaris 10 and IRIX).

If that were the case then Debian GNU/kFreeBSD would be done too.

It's not just games that people run on phones. And regardless, Microsoft wants (read; needs) people to release programs in general for Windows mobile, so they seem to be going the path of making it easy for people to just hit "compile" and be able to deploy it.

Think tablets and phones (Windows Tablets and phones)

Everyone knows BIE is a myth...(although it might be a good campaign platform).

We don't work on mainframes, servers, and desktops anymore? Sorry, didn't get that memo (and neither did my paycheck). Laptops are largely treated the same as desktops.

Most distros use GNOME. Most distros use PulseAudio. Most distros use NetworkManager And now, most distros use systemd. I'll let you guess who pushed most of these? Guess who is responsible for PulseAudio, NetworkManager, systemd, libxml, gnulib, and very large portions of the GNOME project? And who is the only player that matters for commercial Linux (Oracle doesn't count since OEL is rebuilt RHEL)? Keep telling yourself Red Hat is just /etc/sysconfig and RPM (actually, RPM IS the standard package manager for Linux based on the Linux Standard Base)

I'm pretty sure they know what they're doing - but that doesn't mean they are acting in everyone's best interest either.

As a UNIX admin, I actually do very much dislike the Linux world these days. Working with IRIX, Solaris, and HP-UX made me that way.