The issue is that there are no developers there. There are just users talking authoritatively at other users. You get no inflow of information and the same rumours, bad advice, scaremongering stories are stated again and again.

For example: One person blogs about KMS now working on Intel cards and how plymouth will use this, next person says that nvidia and ati wont be supported by plymouth, the next person blames his system crash on plymouth as that was the thing that was on the screen during the boot, the next person worries how it is impossible to remove plymouth now, the next cries out a conspiracy theory of how the systems are locked-down and freedom is suppressed, the next complains that time is wasted doing this work rather than fixing feature X which he told to a friend once in the pub, yet no one has come running to fix.

None of these things are true and at no point does a developer step in to say "I understand the system and here are the facts". Primarily because there are no developers, just packagers. And though the entire process of spreading fallacies, everyone feels great about themselves thinking they have contributed something. They haven't.

I install whichever OS they ask for. I also install Windows XP and getting the accelerated drivers for that is actually a pain. Why all three? Because there are Suse fans who feel most comfortable using Suse. Because there are multiprocessor simulators which are distributed only in .deb packages. Because, and I really must strongly emphasise this, there really isn't much of a difference between the distributions and there are no dragons!. They are all collections of the same software. If I solve a bug on one, it is the same solution on the others. This is why I feel strongly that distros should upstream their efforts. But perhaps most importantly, I do this because I want people to be comfortable using their computers. The reinstall cycle is about once every 2 years. I would appreciate you not insinuating people being mentally deficient on the ground that I put in more effort that is strictly necessary, after all the open source community is driven by people who put in more effort than the minimum necessary to get the job done, in order to make others' lives better

[citation required]
And not just a post by an Ubuntu user who heard it off a friend. I hear this every day and never met anyone who has supporting evidence. Along with "Fedora is just for servers", "Fedora uses bleeding edge so nothing works" and "there be dragons in them hills".

I install Ubuntu, Suse and Fedora on university machines on a daily basis. There is no massive discerning difference between these distributions that makes one much easier for 3d drivers than the other. All three have package repos for proprietary drivers and are as easy to set up.

And that's the entire point. Ubuntu has a massive following of very vocal non-coding users. I contribute an upstream project and I often go to the Ubuntu forums looking for any bugs people have found. These are swamped with hundreds of trolls, moaners and flamers. Most will explain how much of a waste of time a particular project is, how the coders are morons and how things are getting worse every day, while smugly pretending to be uber-experts in everything. None of them would ever consider investigating bugs, talking to people upstream, downloading the code, submitting patches. This is not contributing back to the community.

All this noise distracts from the real contributors who actually do the work, quietly, productively and without much of a fanfare.

Ubuntu community gives as much to the open source community as 4chan gives to the modern art movement.

I spent 2 years installing apt on fedora machines, and about 3 or 4 years ago I stopped, because yum is now just as good as apt. It has the same features, is just as easy and the performance difference is, to me, not visible.

Currently downloading and saturating my 100Mbps connection.

It works, and it works amazingly well. I admin 50+ machines and I used to always install both the nvidia and ati closed drivers because users want compiz. A year ago ati cards started working out the box, now so does nvidia.

Microsoft has it's Most Valued Professional program. I'm one of them (System Center Operations Manager). It's actually a pretty good deal - probably better then most of the other programs out there.
They bring you out once a year for a week long summit (Pay your own way there, lodging and food taken care of by MS), you get cutting edge information in the product you are MVP for, and you get a comped MSDN + TechNet sub (That even their employees don't get). Add on top of that a few hundred dollars in credit to the MS company store and a few thousand dollars in free software from other companies and it's awesome.

Bad mouth MS all you want, but they do take care of their MVPs - and all you have to do is blog/respond on the newsgroups.

Woot to nedit!

This is fairly low isn't it?
Using the climax of a massive democratic process to tie people to a monopolistic format just to show some stats how even Linux users have Moonlight so it is perfectly acceptable for this to become a new standard.

Apple should really be slapped for repeatedly misrepresenting their products. I will buy a beer to anyone who can find a single photo of any of their products on the store website. Every single one has been hand generated usually with incorrect proportions.