Yes, Ubuntu has been using upstart since 2006. Fedora was, too, but they're moving to systemd. Both of these have nice compatibility with sysvinit. There are reasons for change, of course, but you can read up on that for yourself on wikipedia. The upstart docs are plentiful, too.

* They can't standardize on a technology. Lets take audio. First something else, then OSS, then ALSA, then PulseAudio... what next,

You're a bit confused, here, it seems. OSS and ALSA refers to the sound api in the kernel. If you're interested in linux, you can forget about OSS, it's been deprecated since kernel 2.5, or something like that. So you're left with ALSA.

Userland is a different thing. PulseAudio is the sound server du jour. Except for some serious people (recording, etc.), who use JACK. There are lots and lots of apis and libraries and frameworks, some historical, some more integrated in certain desktop environments (phonon for kde). I think this is the mess you're talking about?

and in how many months? A technology can never mature under Linux.

It's almost impossible to get people to agree about what the best implementation is. Without some agreement, there can be no standardisation and maturation. Sound is a peculiar one, too, because different people want different things from it. But it's like that even with upstart vs systemd.

In my opinion, this churn and restlessness is what pushes technology and evolves into better and better solutions to the problems we face. There are unfortunately other factors that are inevitable in open source communities (personality, politics, style, licensing) that cause conflict and cause more churn than needed.

It's easy to compare to Windows or Mac, but it's not really fair, as you probably realise. Those operating systems have bosses that give out orders, and programmers follow. Money makes sure there are resources, etc. This gets the job done on time and sets a standard, since it gets integrated into the OS and there are often no alternatives. People don't chop and change sound servers on Windows or Mac (as far as I know, at least). The level of customisation that linux based oses offer is a feature, in my opinion, and will encourage the evolution we need for good software.

But with all this comes a lot of discomfort for the end user. I'm struggling like hell to run a (very) custom debian testing install on my old laptop. It takes an hour to build a kernel while my quad core at work takes 5 minutes.

An alarming thing, however, is the dumbing down process that I've perceived with Ubuntu (and Gnome). They try to cater for the lowest common denominator, so configurability goes out the window. I've heard that you can't even specify application font sizes in Gnome 3 (just large, normal, small, smaller, etc). This is why I stick with Debian. I might have to jump from Gnome to Xfce again if it gets ridiculous.

Henry