"...even FreeBSD and OpenSolaris...haven't been embraced like Linux. Why is that, do you think?"
OpenSolaris is, as you say, a "johnny-come-lately" and although Sun's CDDL licence is copyleft. it is not GPL compatible. It just doesn't have the weight of the GNU/Linux community behind it. Having said that, there's a lot to like in OpenSolaris.
The BSD groups - NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD have several licences but tend to be very non-restrictive and non-copyleft (which is why Apple could base Mac OSX on BSD).
"BSD licenses represent a family of permissive free software licenses. The original was used for the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix-like operating system after which the license is named. The original owners of BSD were the Regents of the University of California because BSD was first written at the University of California, Berkeley. The first version of the license was revised, and the resulting licenses are more properly called modified BSD licenses. Permissive licenses, sometimes with important differences pertaining to license compatibility, are referred to as "BSD-style licenses". Several BSD-like licenses, including the New BSD license, have been vetted by the Open Source Initiative as meeting their definition of open source. The licenses have few restrictions compared to other free software licenses such as the GNU General Public License or even the default restrictions provided by copyright, putting it relatively closer to the public domain"
"The BSD License allows proprietary commercial use, and for the software released under the license to be incorporated into proprietary commercial products. Works based on the material may be released under a proprietary license or as closed source software. This is the reason for widespread use of the BSD code in commercial products, ranging from Juniper Networks routers to Mac OS X."
See
List of FSF approved software licences - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia for a list of FSF approved software licences and the FSF itself
Licenses - Free Software Foundation
and
Frequently Asked Questions about the GNU Licenses - Free Software Foundation
GNU/Linux has a lot more developers and, significantly, is doing a lot of work with hardware manufacturers to persuade them to release open drivers and, failing that, to allow the Linux Kernel community access to specifications so that they can develop open drivers. Yes, they're offering FREE driver development complete with NDAs! See
linux kernel monkey log
I guess that's probably why.
Finally, it does strike me as odd that Keef, despite his apparently massive Linux experience ("..Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, Mepis, Ubuntu, Slackware, SuSe and a couple of others...") says
"I had to (re)learn a load of batch command language to make, configure, install etc various bits. Poking modules into the core was part of the fun." because Linux uses scripts (rather than DOS' very limited batch language) and nobody calls the kernel the core. And you load kernel modules, not "poke them in".
It must be ages since I have compiled my own packages with stuff like:
# tar xvzf package.tar.gz (or tar xvjf package.tar.bz2)
# cd package
# ./configure
# make
# make install
(and maybe make clean)
(./configure comes before make BTW Keef....)
Now as to the awful graphics problems - it would certainly make a modicum of sense when buying a new card to make sure that it has some degree of support by Linux. Buying one at random may well lead to tears - having said that, most of the Nvidia and ATI cards are well supported by open drivers and certainly have proprietary drivers.
I've never used Red Hat/Fedora, but there are plenty of utilities for configuring your X-server without struggling though
"X-Server files are hundreds of lines long and pernickety in the extreme". The only times I've ever had to do that was ages ago when setting up a dual display. And few minutes Googling comes up with stuff like
redhat.com | which seems to cover most of the bases.
I have various bitches about Linux but they're more to do with things like setting up Samba users than Keef style problems.
Just a few passing thoughts....
Ho hum!