Hey, I use Ubuntu for my desktop at work, and in the past have done substantial deployments of it to managed end-user desktops. It's not beneath me or anything.
I'm sneering at a particular subset of Ubuntu users -- the entire userbase of ubuntuforums.org, the Digg/Reddit/Lifehacker "top ten ways to..." readers. They are the "Power Users" of desktop Linux -- they have no clue how anything works nor the facility to learn, but they sure are earnest and they love to evangelize! They'll seize any opportunity to apply their cargo-cult knowledge to help you with the problems they think you have.
In past generations these people (largely adolescents) would have been know-nothing partisan tweakers of Windows, Classic Mac OS, BeOS, Amiga, or any number of 8-bit home computer platforms. For now Linux is the cool thing to wank over -- compiz helped a lot with that. A couple years ago it looked like a lot of them were defecting to the Hackintosh community -- does anyone know if that trend held up numbers-wise?
Why are you calling these people "Ubuntards"? I don't know about Digg or Lifehacker but the vast majority of Linux people on Reddit despise Ubuntu and use Arch instead.
I know that http://www.reddit.com/user/dons is constantly evangelizing Haskell and Arch on reddit, to the point where he's self-parodying. He's also single-handedly responsible for there being 1314 (!) haskell packages in Arch.
At least Arch gives the tweakers a bit more rope with which to form either a noose or a lasso.
I'm sneering at a particular subset of Ubuntu users -- the entire userbase of ubuntuforums.org, the Digg/Reddit/Lifehacker "top ten ways to..." readers. They are the "Power Users" of desktop Linux -- they have no clue how anything works nor the facility to learn, but they sure are earnest and they love to evangelize! They'll seize any opportunity to apply their cargo-cult knowledge to help you with the problems they think you have.
In past generations these people (largely adolescents) would have been know-nothing partisan tweakers of Windows, Classic Mac OS, BeOS, Amiga, or any number of 8-bit home computer platforms. For now Linux is the cool thing to wank over -- compiz helped a lot with that. A couple years ago it looked like a lot of them were defecting to the Hackintosh community -- does anyone know if that trend held up numbers-wise?