As an example, I’ve not found anything in the Ubuntu world that’s as easy to use as http://www.fedorafaq.org/. Instead the documentation is scattered around; there’s the release notes http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/810 – which you can’t find from “Documentation” https://help.ubuntu.com/8.10/index.html which don’t mention Medibuntu or easy links to https://help.ubuntu.com/community or Launchpad or the forums.

Another example: I discovered that my floppy drive support had disappeared with Intrepid. It’s actually a simple job of adding “floppy” to /etc/modules, and one line in the release notes or a FAQ would have been really useful. Instead there are loads of good and bad suggestions in the forums and bug lists, which could have been avoided completely if the answer was readily available.

One sort of tangent example that comes to mind is Sun’s work on ZFS — they threw out some of the normal ideas of modularity and instead combined things different than has been traditionally done.

I have been thinking for awhile that while Ubuntu does a good job of integrating so many pieces together, it might become desirable to treat the packaging of Gnome in a less monolithic way. A huge part of the Ubuntu experience hinges on what Gnome looks like and its paradigms (which in turn has many dependencies on X.org, which in turn has a lot to do with the kernel), and instead of treating Gnome (for example) as one big thing, maybe a more selective approach would be better.