Making the April Fool's joke a collaboration between 5 debian distros to create a unified distribution which, and I quote "target is to produce a really unified effort and be able to stand up in a combined effort against proprietary operating systems, to show off that the Free Software community is actually able to work together for a common goal instead of creating more diversity", is one interesting exercise in self-deprecation.
Given the spirit of the day, in which a story must be ran that is somewhat believable but shocking, it is curious that among the linux community the story is about at lack of collaboration, a need to unify, and a requirement to compete with commercial software.
Of course, this "unified effort" is having all 5 distros combine the same gag for one day. But... what if I didn't get the joke?
www.archlinux.org
www.debian.org
www.gentoo.org
www.opensuse.org
www.grml.org