| Linux distributions like Ubuntu are
| (by most accounts) superior to Windows

[citation needed]

You're writing "Wrong", but what you say isn't really in conflict with what I wrote. Yes, it's easier for a given developer to fix a bug in Linux software or in kernel/driver. Yes it's easier for them to achieve the perfect state where everything works according to specification/protocol. But when the ethernet card decides for no particular reason to send 1101 instead of 1100 every once in a couple of kBs, it's going to be a bigger deal in a cleanly designed system than in a self-repairing pile of junk.

Given that these kind of bugs will be corrected only when the manufacturers will sell more than say 25% of it's hardware to Linux clients, I humbly predict that these bugs will be fixe in approximately infinity years.

Hardware will always have bugs and they always will be hard to fix. It's the OSes that should step up and act more like error correcting codes. Windows already kinda work like that - by being a monstrous pile of ugly hacks, it naturally gained resistance from relying on something external actually working.

> That's GNU/Linux.

Yeah, I'm sure that the GNU stuff around the kernel (like bash and Gnome) has really big influence on the settings energy saving levels of hardware.

> echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/rfc{11,25}49

What should that do? It seems I can't create a file in net/ipv4 even using sudo.

Fine, what is this then:

Windows (Cygwin):

$ ping -n 20 www.google.com

Pinging www.l.google.com [74.125.39.147] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 74.125.39.147: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=245
[...]
Ping statistics for 74.125.39.147:
Packets: Sent = 20, Received = 20, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 11ms, Maximum = 41ms, Average = 16ms

Ubuntu:

lukas@9a:~$ ping www.google.com
PING www.l.google.com (74.125.39.147) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from fx-in-f147.google.com (74.125.39.147): icmp_seq=1 ttl=245 time=15.3 ms
--- www.l.google.com ping statistics ---
22 packets transmitted, 1 received, 95% packet loss, time 21003ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 15.321/15.321/15.321/0.000 ms

Happens on my network no matter what I change - cables or notebooks, Vista runs ok, Ubuntu sucks big time. The only non-standard thing is that I have wired connection with manual IP address (connected by Linux based Asus router).

lukas@9a:~$ lspci | grep Eth
00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82567LM Gigabit Network Connection (rev 03)

http://www.broadcom.com/support/ethernet_nic/netxtremeii.php

Is this really fair? Broadcom releases at least their ethernet drivers for Linux and Solaris as opensource. I expected that they do the same with they wifi drivers, but I don't really care about wifi.

Can't they recover most of the posts by some resonably complex Google Cache data mining? Shouldn't be that hard.

"The problem can be considered notable in cultural trivia, as the only well-known paper ever published by Microsoft Chairman and billionaire Bill Gates (as William Gates), entitled "Bounds for Sorting by Prefix Reversal", describes an efficient algorithm for pancake sorting. In addition, the only paper published by Futurama co-creator David X. Cohen (as David S. Cohen) concerned the burnt pancake problem. Their collaborators were Christos Papadimitriou (then at Harvard, now at Berkeley) and Manuel Blum (then at Berkeley, now at Carnegie Mellon University), respectively."

'Gates, W. and Papadimitriou, C. "Bounds for Sorting by Prefix Reversal." Discrete Mathematics. 27, 47-57, 1979.'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting