I love this rant with a passion. For me, Tux is the embodiment of the flat out refusal of the linux community at the time to even consider UX or graphic design. At a time when beating Windows on these areas was actually feasible, the OSS community preferred to stop at features, functional, no matter how well or badly done. My favorite example, which the author also quotes, is that the only decent OSS game people were able to come up with was a mario clone with Tux. Graphics? Why would we, we have Tux.

I really like how Ubuntu turned this around and showed people that a usable linux is possible.