As an Ubuntu user, these articles scare the hell out of me. The quit or exit command is not confusing at all. And if you want to get rid of it, you'd better make sure that none of your programs have any memory leaks ever (good luck with that).

You know what is much more confusing than the quit command? Having to go into the CLI or the task manager and kill stuff manually because it is eating half of your memory and processor time doing nothing. Or having to restart your PC every day because it just gets slow after a while.

Here is the most important thing about GUI design - you should confirm people's expectations. People expect to be able to quit stuff.

It is extremely annoying that this starry eyed experimentation is going on in the most popular Linux distro. They are basically risking the one foothold Linux has been able to make in the desktop world. If you want to experiment, you should start an experimental distro and not risk your's and Linux's one single solid success.