LARC is a huge benefit in the Solaris world, where the comparison is UFS. Solaris UFS is unbelievably primitive, and the reason why job 1 in many SOlaris shops is to buy a third-party filesytem for any serious work.

In the Linux world, where aggressive use of caching has been standard for over a decade it compares a lot less favourably.

That said, btrfs management is a shit sandwich. ZFS's management tools actually let you, you know, use the advertised features of the filesystem.

I wonder how long it is before Canoncial make their own fork, claiming to be contributing code back to an upstream no-one's heard of.

I failed to see what the big benefit of GRUB was in the first place. It adds a huge amount of complexity for standard Intel boxes, minimal benefits, and when it was first jammed into distros, regressed all sorts of use cases (such as booting from broken software RAIDs).

Much like the Linux audio subsystems, it's a tail of throwing out something that works for 90% of users, replacing it with something of dubious virtue, and then declaring the remaining problems too hard to solve and moving on to the Next Big Thing (GRUB 2 in this case), while giving you a pile of new and insane problems to deal with.

I've dealt with RedHat, and their support has been superb for the most part, working through weekends for crticial problems and shipping us kernel patches for feature enhancements when we've needed them.

I'd like some evidence that you actually have more understanding of how to run a profitable game company than the people you're flinging poo at.

They've certainly got a better track record of getting stuff into the mainline kernel than Google, of late, and I'd hope nobody from Ubuntu-land was throwing rocks at them, either...

Most likely. But RedHat are now driving a decent chunk of Java business (making more from JBoss than RHEL these days, I believe).

Always completely clusless, huh? I guess you've got a successful PC games company going, then?

Boy, I guess it's just as well that "Windows" covers one operating system with one API for writing games with, not DX9/10, XP/Vista/7, and multiple additions of each operating system release, plus multiple processor and GPU architectures. That would be a nightmare.

No, SunFire V440s and V490s, which have been an exercise in terrible since they were new - long histories of kernel panics on memory errors that only go away after motherboard+CPU swaps.