In 2008 I had installed Ubuntu and finally made the switch to… GNU/Linux. Then I sent a mail (in French, my native tongue) to Stallman, telling basically “thank you for your work, without all your efforts I wouldn’t have been using Linux today” — the situation was sort of similar.

I got a nice reply (in French) in which he underlined that calling GNU/Linux only Linux was neither kind nor accurate, along, IIRC, with the link pointing to http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html He wasn’t angry at all, and I certainly didn’t get insulted. In fact was very kind of him to take the time to reply to a simple user who had nothing to contribute except a simple “thanks”.

This is just the personal experience of a simple, anonymous Ubuntu GNU/Linux user.

@David Wright: I could not agree with you more. My last foray into Ubuntu Linux I was marvelling at how smoothly the installation went and how far Linux had come since my last foray. Then I tried to install the driver for my ATI graphics card. I was greeted by an intemperate message box from Shuttleworth’s crew lambasting ATI for not making their driver open source. Not giving a fig about this ideological nonsense I installed the driver anyway only to find my desktop rendered unusable by a retaliatory graffiti attack from the ATI boys (understandably miffed they’d put a lot of work into writing a driver for Ubuntu only to be attacked for not doing something that was probably legally impossible).
Unfortunately I’m one of those people who cannot let go of a technical challenge until I’ve either solved it or have run out of approaches to try. A day later, I’d gotten the driver in without the graffiti and had learned more than I ever wanted to know about the differences between Linux distros. Unfortunately I’d also once again come to the conclusion that life is too short for this kind of time-sapping crap and gone back to Windows!

People caring for the freedom of the software is the only reason why you can USE GNU/Linux in the first place.

Personally, I think of the “average end-user” as being like the middle class. Everyone knows it when they see it, but good luck describing it. The free software community doesn’t want or need the approval of anyone to keep operating. They’re content to be who they are and continue the development toward a future where what “just works” will in fact be free software. I daresay, those that make the claim “the proprietary driver for my cutting-edge laptop was impossible to find under GNU/Linux, so I used Windows 7″ really need to think about the community they put themselves in. If GNU/Linux doesn’t work for you and your “needs”, by all means, don’t use it. Meantime, if you want to make the stretch and value what you’ve got (and by the way, I’m posting this from a completely libre netbook), there’s a whole world out there to explore where you can use a full, free system and be proud of it.