This will be a wordy answer. There IS a lot to cover.
If you want to feel like you or it are being victimized, go right ahead. I'm an art geek who finds Linux and UNIX as useful as drybrush (and more useful than papier mache right now. How did I get into that?). UNIX geeks are the core of the old Linux users. One difference in answers we give is I'll often go back to packages, some of which predate the kernel, but which are still being maintained. You seem to prefer frontends. Neither is itself what I mean by a UNIX geek (sometimes called a mainframer). The GNU tools which are at the heart of the OS were written by UNIX Geeks who are ideologues. They are serious about Free and Open Source Software, they are SUCH excellent engineers my next apparent digression will be a plug, and since they KNOW as engineers, how something works, they like to see it done this way (with FOSS).
What is Ubuntu? You know that I think it is Debian remixed for consumers. Most of the development Canonical and its people do is in Security and updating -- which n00bies and other consumers will be most helped by. They dress it up with snazzy graphics -- which the FSF people have always encouraged --and license packages which may not be so open source. The FSF may object but Linus Torvalds thinks they are just peachy. And he's right. Mark Shuttleworth is a very smart businessman and a very good engineer.
What is the UNIX geeks response? http://www.gnewsense.org is the BEST Ubuntu LiveCD I've tried since 2005. And it's ALL FOSS software. These guys are CONSUMATE engineers. Shuttleworth has been quoted as saying it's better than the Ubuntu Foundation's OWN FOSS Ubuntu.
The hard fact is of course, there are a lot of Unix Geeks who don't believe n00bies and consumers should have the same rights as the rest of us. As I'm typing this on my Gentoo laptop I find myself wondering whether to type "let them eat Gentoo". Now there is a verbal response but it takes time to explain. I started an argument on Goklaw today and didn't get away totally unscathed but what happened in that thread was FUN. It started when someone put in his own two cents about the Future of computing. He seemed to think Multicore processors were a given. Donald Knuth, author of the Tex system, (look it up) and the textbook Mathematical Algorithms (I may have the title wrong. I'm on my Gentoo box and my volumes of it are in the garage) launched a scathing attack on Multicore Processors (as reported in the Register) and I couldn't resist doing a "Donald Knuth might disagree with you". The responses are a better discussion of his importance to the field of Computer Science than I could give. Winter, who I was answering, is a serious computer professional and a thoughtful man whose own responses in the discussion are quite good. I recommend reading it:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080501221928722#comments
The point is Knuth recently said he NOW does his serious computing on a laptop not connected to the Internet running Ubuntu. The quote is: "I trust my family jewels to Linux". Since I find computer crashes interesting when they don't happen every day I of course can respect him while choosing not to emulate him. I'm always pushing my hardware too far. I'm an artist.
I seriously have reservations about Linux becoming so popular because we don't all use computers the same way. During the last American Presidential election Chaosium distributed some bumper stickers which read "Cthulhu for President: Why settle for the Lesser Evil?" To me, *nix is still the lesser evil. Commercial Printing has had proprietary standards for more than a century so to me Gimp is useless because it is Open Source (though I USE Inkscape and just watched the movie "Big Buck Bunny" which was produced by the Blender people on Ubuntu systems, this morning and both packages are Open Source). Microsoft would like to replace those printing standards with its own, even though it knows nothing of the subject. They are SURE they know what computing is, and of course, so are many UNIX geeks. And they're all wrong. Other than making marks on a surface, nobody is sure what DRAWING is, and computing is a far more complex subject. So when I run into the occasional fanbois and grrls who think Ubuntu is original and everything is Ubuntu and have no clue that Linux was written to run X-Windows NOT the other way around I'm as put off as I am by those for whom UNIX is a religion -- and every true believer in between. It would be good that Linux 'whatever flag it flies' is becoming more popular, but the only flag all Linux flies is the penguin. Beyond that it flies many many flags and there are many users who can barely talk to each other.