Yeah, but who said anything about writing drivers? Very few people can do that. How about just really basic stuff, like how to not have ads for Amazon popping up when there is no need?

The driver issue is, in my opinion, the single biggest problem with not using Windows or Mac. If you just jump right into that issue i.e. that the latest driver for your peripehral is not going to be available for some time and ignore all the other benefits of Linux and other UNIX-like systems, then you could pretty easily conclude these systems are worthless. Hardware manufacturers don't care about them. They only care about Windows and Mac.

But we all know these other systems like Linux are far from worthless.

Clearly, there is some middle ground.

You can still do a heck of a lot without the source code for the 2012 driver for Whiz Bang Hardware Component.

If Canonical and Ubuntu decided not to accept any binary blobs I wonder if the "strides" would seem as huge.

These days Ubuntu has made some seriously poor decisions; I won't deny that (Unity is a joke, this Amazon thing is a huge lol). But Canonical was vital in the push to get Linux on the desktop and to be accepted as more than a "hacker's playground" that is too hard to use for the average person.

Chromebooks and other low-cost appliances like it are successful in large part because of how easy Ubuntu/Canonical made it to transfer into the Linux world from Windows.

I personally use an Ubuntu 11.x build for everything these days (minus some plain Debian builds on my ARM7 devices), and I really like what they've done for Linux - even if the present stuff they've done has been a little stupid.