I agree. I've not been able to get multi-monitor working properly on my radeon 3000 integrated video since Ubuntu 10.04. 11.04 had an issue with windows having no borders and not responding to mouse and keyboard focus changes on the second screen. In 11.10, the proprietary driver just doesn't work beyond mirroring screens. The default driver spawns everything in the exact center of the 3360x1050 desktop after having to manually exit xconf to avoid the 1680x1680 max res problem. Tried PCBSD (unix, I know), couldn't get anything other than the default driver to work. Tried Debian - same problems as 11.04 and no sound. Tried Linux Mint and Kubuntu 11.04, same problems as ubuntu 11.04. All I want is full screen sound, full screen flash on a monitor that isn't stretched out, and for programs to launch on the screen I requested it on.

Also, driver support is still half-assed amongst hardware makers. My brother (2070N) printer's Debian driver is a automatic conversion of a Redhat driver that tries to copy a file to a directory that doesn't exist on Ubuntu by default, so I have to create the directory first before installing if I don't want guaranteed failure. They didn't even try it once before releasing it or they would have caught it.

I'm thinking about trying a redhat distro this weekend, but I don't have great confidence.

Doesn't all the traffic in the US go through a relatively small number of backbone providers at some point? Set up a deal with all of them so you can pull the plug with a phone call. Chances are all the major consumer ISPs use the major backbone providers, so you can quell disruptive thoughts there. Protecting your local power stations depends on if their ISPs use those backbones, too.