[martey]

Written in 2003, and its age shows. It is clear that the people working at Ubuntu and other distros only care about making their product easier to use by non-programmers.

'Raymond does attempt to compare and contrast Unix to other operating systems, and this is really the weakest part of an otherwise excellent book, because he really doesn't know what he's talking about. Whenever he opens his mouth about Windows he tends to show that his knowledge of Windows programming comes mostly from reading newspapers, not from actual Windows programming. That's OK; he's not a Windows programmer; we'll forgive that.'

Joel is not a Unix programmer; we'll forgive that.

[barrkel]

Canonical is being funded by a billionaire with an explicit goal of making Linux user-friendly. It didn't exactly generate that motivation intrinsically; it was injected by economic force from without.

[billswift]

All of the major distros do it - the biggest irritation I have with Red Hat and Debian are their package managers - both rpm and apt add a layer of cruft I have to learn without really improving on tarballs, except that they are easier for people who can't be bothered moving untarred files to the correct directories. And since the "correct" directories are different on different distros, they are a royal pain when working with more than one distro.