The real mystery is the spam combining various pseudo-random words, usually containing the word "BSD" in somewhere, and putting them into a link which points to goat.cx. The topic of the message is usually something like "m0d d03n". That one has been around for many years.

Hahaa. :D

Been there, seen it. Also called the "downvote brigade". When someone posts something against the hive mind, that message gets voted down, but then also every other message by the poster in the thread is meticulously voted down to oblivion!

Also other kinds of malicious downvoting are quite common in Reddit.

Those things being said, I still do find the system of unlimited votes to often be quite fun.

That's true.

Troll is a person posting an inflammatory message with the deliberate intent of exciting readers into a controversial response. This is the exact definition.

But the word is misused a lot, indeed. For example, just writing hateful comments, or messages with disinformation, is not trolling.

GP's claim was that it is "very easy to choose a stable distro that doesn't live on the bleeding edge". For many people Ubuntu LTS is an obvious choice. If there suddenly comes a rule that Ubuntu cannot be used, then the choice is obviously not very easy.

Are you aware that the fan bug slipped right into the main kernel of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. It was finally fixed in July in Ubuntu kernel 3.13.0-31.

It's a bit amateurish to dismiss the parent with the classic "it works for me, there must no problem". For example, maybe your university machines were mostly the same brand of conservative desktop machines which had quite basic hardware with well-tested interoperability with Windows Update? I mean, if you have a bunch of HP or Dell machines with Intel integrated graphics, the chances of things exploding are probably lower than with some more hot rod hardware.

The nice thing about Windows Update drivers is that they sometimes allow you to install the the sole driver instead of the 300MB garbage pack from the vendor. :)

The scary thing about Linux is that they can do sometimes platform updates which suddenly break fundamental things like keyboard or ACPI fan control.

But then again, the bleeding-edge development process also allows to get all the new cool features quickly into the kernel.

Umm, looking at the replies to the parent comment shows a bit different picture. They seem to have pondered it seriously.

The definition of trolling is to post messages with the deliberate intent of exciting readers into an emotional response, so I'm not sure if it's the correct term to use here. I don't think that was the main motivation of the writer of the review.

You have to remember that there might be many cases like this where the negative review gets successfully removed and gets no public attention. That might be the reason why "they won't learn" -- because the trick might actually work.