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(Get the code!)
@florin (comment #90): I am a free and open source software proponent and I fully sympathise with your sentiments. Indeed, I have myself felt this often. The problem is that, of late, both the GNOME project and Canonical have been increasingly focussing on adapting their user interfaces for mobile and touch-oriented devices, which require different approaches than traditional desktops and laptops. As a result, many other bugs in the existing software are either getting neglected or are even being created as regressions, when in previous versions they did not exist. For example, Ubuntu 10.04 is infinitely more stable than Ubuntu 11.10. More importantly, 10.04 does not have all the features of 11.10, but what it does have works absolutely correctly and as expected, which is what matters. Similarly, the Debian distribution also provides a stable and reliable system which is not updated with every fad and fancy. The same goes for the KDE SC project. The only way to have a stable OS today (open source) that I can think of is either using Ubuntu's LTS release, which is Ubuntu 10.04 at present and will be 12.04 in April, although the number of new features in 12.04 is again huge, or using something other than Ubuntu which does not rush with updates, such as Debian or OpenSUSE. I have personally also found Fedora to be much better than Ubuntu at fixing bugs, although it provides updates even more frequently. But most of the time, when there is some annoying bug in Fedora, they fix it much more quickly than Ubuntu. The Unity interface in 11.10, for example, had bugs related to both the window management system for maximised LibreOffice windows as well as the launcher quick-lists, which were fixed just a few days ago when the next version of Ubuntu is almost due. By contrast, Fedora fixed most of its problems in version 16 very rapidly after they were reported. I only hope that Canonical in particular will take stock of the situation and put its quality control back in place for which it was known so well for so long.