I recently switched to Ubuntu from FreeBSD because of driver support problems (i.e. not willingly) and here's my take:<p>* Unity: I don't see what the big deal is. Granted, it's a subjective thing. As someone who generally dislikes DEs and would normally use just a tiling window manager maybe I don't appreciate the finer points in DE wars. I've been reluctant to install Xmonad because of the fear of what might break, and I have to say I've had no particular annoyances with Unity which I wouldn't have with any other desktop environment. Indeed, all the annoying stuff actually comes from GNOME components that they left. I find the Dash and HUD quite nice.<p>* Online scopes and advertising. In recent years I've come to the conclusion that a free (as in beer) general population friendly OS just isn't going to happen. The work needed to polish things to compete with Windows and OS X in this aspect is extremely boring. No hacker (or even average programmer) is going to spend his free time doing that. You have to be paid to do it. The money has to come from somewhere, thus advertising. I'm not a big fan this, but what Canonical is doing is at the moment our best shot of having a viable desktop OS which just works and lets you get on with your life (and even Ubuntu isn't there yet). And you can disable it with a single switch. Big deal.<p>* Shuttleworth trolling people... Well, it's certainly legitimate to not want to use an OS developed by a company owned by a person who says controversial stuff, but I don't see the technical angle. For example, is OS X better of worse because Jobs was a strange type? And as for Mir (that's what the issue revolves around), if Mir is a bad idea Wayland is also a bad idea. You just can't think Wayland is all peachy and Mir a horrible thing because they both basically do <i>the same</i> thing. All the talk about splitting the community (what community would that be?) makes no sense -- if Canonical decided they need complete control of their graphics stack it's a legitimate decision, and no one has any moral ground to attack that decision. In developing Mir they are not interfering with Wayland in any way, they are simply not participating. (BTW, I don't think either Wayland or Mir are good ideas, we'll end up with the situation we have in OS X, where X can be tacked on when necessary, and it is often necessary, with who knows what kind of crappy support.)<p>I'm no fan of Shuttleworth or Ubuntu, I really just don't care about either on any emotional level, but I'd like a FOSS OS which is also free as in beer AND just works on the desktop and lets me get on with my work and life. After you get to a certain age in life, fiddling with the OS gets old real fast.