Linux 3.2 Now Available
Linus Torvalds officially released the Linux kernel 3.2.
"I delayed 3.2 first a few days to wait for the final linux-next ("final" in the sense that that's what I'll fetch to decide whether something has been in linux-next for 3.3 or not), and then some more as people were coming back from holidays and sorting out some regressions," Torvalds wrote in the announcement.
"So we do have a few last-minute reverts and small fixes. Still, there's not a whole lot of changes since -rc7 (shortlog appended), and almost all of them are *tiny*. So despite the few annoying last-minute reverts, I'm feeling pretty happy about it," he wrote.
Among the new features are support for the power saving technology RC6 for Intel's Ivy Bridge CPUs, which now also covers the graphics unit of the processors. The Nouveau driver adds acceleration support Nvidia's Fermi chips, including NVC1, NVC8 and NVCF GPUs. The TCP stack received support for proportional rate reduction (PRR), the Ext4 file system supports big allocation blocks and the experimental Btrfs has been patched. Additionally, the developers added drivers for two new WLAN chips, Broadcom's Brcm80211 and Atheros' AR6003.

+1 added drivers for new WLAN chips
Yea but the video drivers still suck! When will those get fixed?
P.S. Yeah, yeah I know the hardware manufacturers fault, bla bla, Microsoft monopoly bla bla, they've gotten better but still suck bla bla.
I don't care! Just fix them, the community, the companies, Santa Claus, whoever is up for the task. I'm sick of it already!
This isn't all that big of a deal, if you know what VT-d is and where it is applied, but I imagine that people who will try it out and get a kernel panic when trying to boot will be pretty pissed. You don't need VT-d if you don't need virtualized guest OS's direct access to peripheral hardware.
And I don't know if you have checked or not, but the latest open source nouveau and Rxxx drivers have made huge progress towards everyday usability. Some radeon drivers are even faster than the closed source counter parts, nouveau is working towards no-nonsense power management. They are maturing, even if at a miserably slow pace.
Why don't use fix them? Oh, you have a busy lifestyle, programming is not for you, it's the government's job... better to just complain about it, understandable.
As far as I have heard, btrfs is the default file system of the most recent release of Fedora. The benchmarks aren't quite there yet, but I am sure they are continuing to tweak. It's got a way to go to catch up to ZFS (Solaris), but I think it's great that they are working hard at it.
Yup that's the point of the community and what they like to make a point of being a positive.
Linux Mint 12 currently... anybody have a suggestion? not a fan of Unity or Gnome 3
...interested in UNIX
FreeBSD
Mint 12 works perfectly with Mate with bot Compiz and Cairo and, no need to use Unity and Gnome3 at all.
Otherwize, if you still want something based on Linux Mint but completely Gnome 2 based (not just MAte), then Ultimate Edition 3 maybe your cup of tea? It's based on Mint 11 but comes with everything (and then some) preinstalled including working compiz and 3d-dock (Avant or Cairo) and a ton of theme. Probably the most insanely loaded and complete version with everything "on" from the get go. Not having to hunt down themes is probably the greatest time saver...