Even if you could raise the money, I doubt that he would do it, or that it would be comparable to his OS X articles.

If you listen to Hypercritical (his weekly 5by5 podcast), you'll have heard that he struggles just getting the OS X reviews out the door. Since Apple is trying to move to a yearly release cycle, that’s just going to get harder. When’s he going to get the time to write an Ubuntu review?

It’s also worth considering that, “He has been a Mac user since 1984” (from his Ars bio). Part of what makes his reviews so good is his deep-rooted knowledge of the Mac platform, and having watched OS X (and previous versions of Mac OS) “grow up”, so to speak. I don’t know how much experience he has with Ubuntu, but I bet it’s not as extensive as OS X.

And that’s putting aside all the arguments of whether it’s a good thing to do, or whether the Ubuntu community would want him to write such a thing.

That is touching my open source nerve, the penguins ought to be able to assemble something like this themselves.

This is hilarious. Mythical man ymonth applied to writing. Let's crowd source some more Tolstoy novels while we're at it.

A review of a computer system is hardly a major work of art. Brooks' n(n+1)/2 won't kick in until we exceed five or ten people I think.