"In fact, it's one of the things that keep me from trying out stuff like Linux for real."

If you're even remotely involved in technology as a profession, this is a deficiency in your skillset. Linux now runs much of the world and isn't really a novelty.

"If a question like 'which audio driver do i best install?' can only be answered by reading through a multi-year flamewar, why would I bother?"

Unless you have specialist needs it's not really a question that should pop up any more, your distro of choice ought to make that decision for you.

"Still, to me, 'end-user FOSS' and 'hate and anger' are somehow symbolically linked."

Kinda. This is a bit different as it's not a war over "A or B" but the direction A is taking.

The problem, particularly with Gnome at present, is that the direction it's taking is not appreciated by most existing users. It's compounded by the fact that a lot of people liked Gnome 2, and the Gnome team basically canned that at short notice. Distributions then started to roll out Gnome 3 and remove Gnome 2. Gnome 3 forces them to work differently and takes away a lot of choice. So users were annoyed, the desktop environment they liked seemed to be being taken away from them and the new one seemed to be making a lot of stuff worse.

From the developers' perspective (as far as I can tell) the thought was basically that Gnome 2 was finished, stable, unexciting and old fashioned. A drive took place to create a new, modern desktop with a consistent experience. Logically then, this would bring new users to Linux. Some resistance from techies was to be expected, people don't like change, but they'll thank us for it in the end.

I'm not 100% sure why the distros ditched Gnome 2 quite so fast, but the announcement of support and development basically being dropped didn't help. The Gnome team also seem to have gone out of their way to make sure that the two could not easily reside on the same system.

Anyway, these three things in confluence make people feel like the Gnome team have taken something from them (not really true) and the Gnome team think that naysayers are all entitled and change resistant (also not really true). So it's no wonder it's a rather heated area.

If you want to watch FOSS at its constructive best I recommend the debian mailing lists. You'll still find disagreement on there, but you'll also see people helping each other and getting stuff done.

I think part of the reason for your perception is probably that FOSS is done far more out in the open than something like MS Windows, and in a far less hierarchical way, so there's nobody to pull rank or to hush things up. Linus may well be in charge of the kernel, but only has a limited say over the user space (for example).

(This has become quite a bit longer than it was meant to be!)

Also, I'd be interested to know if you think the vitriol between FOSS advocates is any worse than, say, all the Mac/Windows shouting matches you see all over the net? Or Ps3/Xbox weenies? (BTW if you really want to see FOSS vitriol go observe a GPL vs BSD license freedom debate!)

I think people on the net just like to argue. I know I do. Free/Open software is developed out in the open through mass collaboration, which gives so much wonderful, flamey opportunity.