FWIW I think you are absolutely correct, "I eagerly await ${predictable_event}" adds little.
I do think that a user controllable OS that provided a unified desktop/handset/mediacenter/cloud environment would be a good thing.
I think apple has provided some very worthwhile innovations; but as we go into the late adoption phase, we need open standards, and openly licensed environments that are Owned by the end user.
That would be part of why I am eager for alternate software loads for this sexy hardware.
Yes there are increasing levels of abstractions, and no its not always clean; but the world changes and its useful to look at different types of abstractions. Linux provides a "playground" for trying out abstractions, seeing what works and what doesn't -- and the stuff that doesn't work does tend to get factored out over time.
For example dbus: I've used it in embedded environments (no bearing at all on "user friendliness") because it facilitates a "new, easier" programming paradigm that is lots of work to achieve otherwise, and this happens to have huge advantages in eg modularity, maintainability, etc for the application domain.
Yes we could choose to do everything using a traditional "pure" unix file-type approach; but why should we not have the opportunity of trying out more "modern" abstractions, building apps & systems on them and seeing how they play out in the real world?
HAL/DBUS are like 5 years old (without actually looking that up), and they come from Freedesktop.org, not Ubuntu. I think they might even pre-date Ubuntu, at least I remember it being in Fedora in the early days before I used Ubuntu.
Also, I don't much understand this "Ubuntu is too user friendly" nonsense. That's kind of a main objective of Ubuntu, if you think it's going to cause problems then use Debian. If Debian is too sissified for you, Linux From Scratch isn't going anywhere, give that a whirl, you can 'rm -rf /' til the cows come home (or until you actually run that completely pointless command).
