I don't think that's necessarily fair to say. I've been using Ubuntu since it first came out for probably the same reasons as most other people - aptitude was d

I don't think that's necessarily fair to say. I've been using Ubuntu since it first came out for probably the same reasons as most other people - aptitude was dead simple and generally seemed to "just work". It probably also won me over initially because out of the box my audio and NIC drivers all worked. Most other features of your average linux system could be found on other distros, so these were the main drivers of me sticking with Ubuntu. Prior to Ubuntu I generally went with Slackware or FreeBSD. I don't think that they're making any sort of direct choice to stop doing those things. I just think that their current desktop manager choices have been bad. I tried installing the latest Ubuntu on my main desktop PC this past weekend and it was a failure. I did get all my drivers working, but they didn't work out of the box anymore. Even once I had them all working, Unity seemed very unstable and in general the experience was very disappointing. It appeared to me that they were positioning themselves so that they could start throwing money making ad software and garbage onto my desktop. Now with the recent blog announcements that they might be enabling direct-from-desktop 1 click purchases and stuff, I doubt I'll ever consider installing it as a desktop, again. At least without xwindows, all of the original reasons for why Ubuntu was awesome still shine.