That's what I was hinting at. IMO, they almost get there, but then get distracted by the next thing. In the words of Steve Jobs: "Real artists ship". If it's not in a box being sold in stores and in people's hands being used/abused/supported, then it's just a hobby.

I usually build my own or work with a local shop when I need a new PC. Early last year, the motherboard failed on my main desktop, I was leaving town on business, and needed to make sure I could get back to work immediately when I returned. I turned to an online purchase from Dell, and had them customize an XPS420. My first --and many times repeated-- requirement: "I need a video card that has a dual DVI output".
"Oh, yes, sir, it's got that".
Of course, it arrived with a DVI/VGA output.
To their credit, when I complained, they shipped me an upgrade card at no cost. Worked out OK for me...would not have for somebody not willing or able to install their own.
Sales staff lying to customers...shocking!

Clue: check the user name. FWIW, I think his posts are great.

Obligatory Maddox link.

I never said we had the guarantee of choice. Do you care to quote me on that? I said we have freedom. No one can force you to buy something, nor can (well, should) they prevent you from buying something. It is your decision.

I entirely agree, the mega-cooperations in bed with government is WRONG. In no way should there be welfare for cooperations. If you cannot turn a profit, you fail and let someone else have their chance to be productive. That is an argument to decrease the power of government, if they had no power to tell companies what to do, they couldn't have bailed them out. You can't say both I am going to tell you how to operate, and then guarantee your success with taxpayer money, it is a financial black hole, not to mention corporate fascism.

You should look at some history from an impartial perspective. Rome fell because (1) they expended their borders and military too quickly (2) established welfare (that's essentially what the Colosseum turned into) and massive government spending in general, (3) they debased and inflated their currency to try and cover for all the expenses... do these things sound familiar? It's what the US is doing right now.

Of course private interests have lives of their own, profit is subjective after all. Sure you can report monetary profits, but profit itself is up to each individual. When I decide to buy $6/gal gas, I do it because I profit (if I don't like it). Likewise, it gets sold to me because the gas station decides they profit. The selfish interests of Apple, Exxon-Mobil, Google has made my life better, and we both profit. You cannot peruse "selfish" interests without violence (or the threat of it, like tax money) or voluntarily cooperation for mutual benefit, like when you go shopping. I don't see how such selfish behavior is harmful.

Phoronix loves doing this. Last time, they compared a beta version of FreeBSD to a release of Ubuntu. The debugging definitely hurts performance.
I complained about this once, but a bunch of teenage kids started saying, "Ubuntu R0X0RS!"
I'm not sure where people got the idea that benchmarks are the one and only metric for comparing OSes. When Ubuntu doesn't win a benchmark in one of their OS shootouts, they'll have some explanation why that doesn't mean a lot.
I think they're still reeling from that time around 1999 or 2000 when NT4 trounced a redhat tuned linux in web server performance. It seems to me that OS X is the real desktop competition for Linux, and that OS X is winning "the hearts and minds" of the users. I'm sure Ubuntu can beat OS X (wasn't there a phoronix shootout about this?) in most benchmarks, but that doesn't matter if desktop users generally prefer OS X.
I suspect it would be useful to have more articles about what is needed to improve in Linux on the desktop... but to be fair, phoronix is just a benchmark, so that would be out of their scope.