I think we should take his advice. He says he doesn't want "leet" Linux users and we should go use something else, and many of us have been taking that advice all along.

Personally, I'm a Gentoo guy and have been for a while. Here are some great hacker distros that I love to use and contribute to:

Gentoo

Arch

Slackware

Debian

And for those who want a "user friendly" distro for their mom to try out:

Linux Mint

Yeah, I said it, I know it's not exactly popular but if you want to convert someone to a Linux user I think Mint is your best bet.

In the end, we still have a choice. Thanks Canonical/Ubuntu for bringing more users and development to the community, we'll just steer them towards something better when they're ready.