I get the frustration 'cuz all of Apple's stuff seems pretty flaky right now, but there's still a huuuuge difference to the linux of 2000: whatever your config

I get the frustration 'cuz all of Apple's stuff seems pretty flaky right now, but there's still a huuuuge difference to the linux of 2000: whatever your config + problems, there's gunna be a bunch of other people running the exact same config, w/ the exact same problems. Which means that there's a pretty good chance w/ time they'll get resolved. (Especially if you avoid upgrading to the latest and shiniest immediately, since Apple seems incapable of finding and fixing problems in-house.) With linux, you could be running a mix of hardware + software that _no-one_ had ever tested before, and whatever your particular config was, it wasn't shared by everyone -- so whether you could get that mix to function properly was pretty much an unknown quantity and required a lot of luck and elbow grease. I do wonder if at some point as the curve of hardware progress flattens out and the space of "what should software do" becomes more explored, we'll start to see more finely crafted software w/ fewer problems. Might be an analogy here to how in the early days of cars they were quite unreliable, but now they're pretty amazingly robust, for years on end. We're in the "new & shitty" stage of software, I think.