He says that he has tried to run a server with GNOME based on CENTOS and that his updates broke the machine. I didn't have such a problem, but who knows what this guy, who assures us he knows what he speaks of, did?

1. Yes, there are some issues with package management on a lot of distributions. These issues aren't as dramatic as this guy is trying to make them seem.

THE POINT:
Linux isn't windows, there are a lot of distributions and I am pretty sure a lot of them can handle a LAMP stack properly.

2. He complains about CENTOS which he used together with GNOME for a LAMP server. Centos isn't quite the "go to" distro when you want everything to just work TM. Yes, it's good enough to be used in a lot of places, but they release updates after redhat has released them and this takes a while; it might also be prone to breaking.
(note: I am using Debian and Ubuntu for everything related to LAMP)

THE POINT:
Use Debian, Ubuntu, buy RHEL or buy Ubuntu support for enterprise if you want to have some kind of safety net when doing updates.

3. He mentions something broke after an update and GNOME was now broken for him (or something along those lines).
I'd get my brain scanned for tumors asap if I got the idea of running X on a production /development web server running in the data center.

THE POINT:
The idea of running X and a desktop environment on a server is a sign that you are looking for trouble. Security issues, wasted resources, more processes, more things to update, more things to check and more things which can crash due to some leak / bug / stray process.

4. Going rageish-murdery-suicidal over some issue with a server is a sign you're doing something wrong, with your professional, personal life or both. Maybe a break is required or some more RTFM is needed. If that's not helping, maybe you should try to find another job and stick to it.

THE POINT:
Complaining about some problem you most likely have caused makes you look like an idiot, especially if you write an article saying you went back to Megabloat TM Windows.

5. Maintaining a LAMP stack web server isn't complicated when you have a "root server" in a datacenter with a RAID1 / RAID 10 storage array. It's quite probably the most tested part of most linux distributions.

THE POINT:
I've helped linux newbies who can use Ubuntu set up their own webservers by themselves and they complained a lot less about any kind of issues. It's not rocket science.

6. He mentioned "software I had to compile from source", but he never says anything specific like: "I had this version of foo-bar-x.y and needed foo-bar-x.y+2 because they fixed this extremely bad exploit, but there was no package for it". Come on, you want to convince people, right? So why not share some pieces of information about the part which might be the most important and, probably, the cause of the alleged failure?

THE POINT:
The article is all too vague all around, chasing around the tail.

7. The tone and the splitting of the articles in such a way that there's a "murdery-suicidal" subjective section and a fake objective "after things were done" section makes me think this was something someone paid to have on the web.
I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to do something like this as they have done far worse things in the past.

THE POINT:
Exposing your own failure, real or invented, to try to manipulate people into picking Windows over Linux or some other *NIX for a server makes you look like a total worthless tool.

His credentials mean nothing to me after I've seen what kind of articles fueled by personal incompetence and failure turned into rage - provided that's even true.

If you search for this article, you will find that it's posted across a lot of websites. I also suspect that it's the zealots who work for zdnet or their sponsors at Microsoft.

As of now, zdnet.com and www.zdnet.com are in my hosts file with a well deserved IP: 127.0.0.1.
From Monday, this will also be the case for the company I work for (just ~1500 workstations).