Quibble: "gave me the background required to be able to help Ubuntu become the first free software operating system to work out of the box on modern laptops"
Wha...? How about all the Linux distros prior to Ubuntu. Debian itself, Red Hat Linux, Suse, Fedora, and others ... all worked "out of the box" on legacy and modern laptops. Heh.
Ubuntu came along later in the game and focused on the desktop as the priority, to include shrugging off free software ideologies, which for example, Fedora was not willing to bend on.
Ubuntu was a not nearly the first out-of-the-box laptop friendly distro
"gave me the background required to be able to help Ubuntu become the first free software operating system to work out of the box on modern laptops"
Wha...? How about all the Linux distros prior to Ubuntu. Debian itself, Red Hat Linux, Suse, Fedora, and others ... all worked "out of the box" on legacy and modern laptops. Heh.
Ubuntu came along later in the game and focused on the desktop as the priority, to include shrugging off free software ideologies, which for example, Fedora was not willing to bend on.
Anyway... otherwise, an interesting discussion.