Blame Fedora. Again.

Debian is getting the software to work together. It's a much more unified system then anything
else I've seen. The thoughtfulness of documentation, configurations, and scripts supplied with
Debian is fantastic for the end user and goes on to benefit other distributions. They take all
the different, disparage, software put out by the community and unifies it. They do this to a
much greater extent then other distributions. And they do it without any commercial support or
corporate control, unlike every other popular distribution.

Who supports the vast majority of software for their distro?
Who makes sure that everything compiles and works well on PowerPC, ARM, and etc? 

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Ubuntu simply copies Debian's packages and sticks them in 'universe' and occasionally does
stupid things that break things. 

But Ubuntu is able to take Debian and Gnome and create a (usually) _very_ solid and thoughtful
desktop experience. They may not be the most technical savvy people out there, but they do do
a fantastic job at making things user friendly. It's all in the details and it shows.

Fedora or Debian gives a much more fractured experience. Much more difficult for people that
have no prior Linux experience.

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And like you said Fedora does a LOT more development on the actual OS then any other
distribution, except maybe Novell and their Suse stuff.

They take much bigger chances and push the envelope much harder. Always with mixed results but
they do do a fantastic job. I always have the feeling that Fedora has much closer
relationships with upstream developers then anybody else. 

All the newer technologies that are making Linux a modern commercially competitive system seem
to come from Fedora-way. It reads like a laundry list. SELinux, for example.

Without Fedora breaking in new software all us Debian and Ubuntu users would be in for a MUCH
MUCH rougher ride. Seriously.


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Everything is a trade off. Ubuntu vs Fedora vs Debian vs whoever.. they all have their
laughably bad moments.

What the pro-nvidia-support folks don't realise is that they are essentially they are telling
Fedora that they should hold back on features and improvements that have a very positive
impact on open source video drivers and a great number of users for the sake of making
Nvidia's job easier.

Don't forget that out of the people that use ATI, Intel, Via, or Nvidia hardware that the
Nvidia proprietary driver users are the much smaller minority.

And anyways. Nvidia has to support Fedora eventually, because within a couple months every
other distribution is going to have the same software with the same API/ABI interfaces.

Actually, slightly tangential to the topic, but I wonder how many DDs are actively working on
the lower-level stuff. I do not believe it is an insignificant figure. For LWN's kernel
contributor analysis, redhat shows up because the contributors are using their @redhat.com
addresses. It would be nice to see some people use their @debian.org ones and see if Debian
could get into the charts. However I expect DDs who are employed to work on kernels are using
their employer's address for commits.