So long, and thanks for all the FOSS

Recently, Wayne blogged that he's had to apologize for Linux's quirks.

Don't worry, Wayne, you're among friends. I've been apologizing for the better part of a year that my Thinkpad T60p w/ MEPIS 6.0:

• doesn't to dual-monitor very well (cursor on second screen tends to disappear, get mangled, or just freeze as it crosses from the laptop to the monitor, so I have a text-selection-pointer no matter what I'm doing on that screen)
• crashes unexpectedly when left alone for hours
• needs ALT-PrtSc,S,U,B to recover from said crashes, or from being put to sleep/suspend
• won't do wireless very well anymore (even with several reboots between config changes)
• sort of works with MEPIS' "bioauth" fingerprint reader, but needs to be swiped twice for every authorization and only works for SOME root-required password requests.

Actually, my current setup involves dual booting between Windows XP Pro and Linux, sharing the same ext3 partition and thus same Eclipse workspace in both OSes. There's a few quirks still to work out, like:

• .lnk files vs. cygwin symlinks -- .lnk files work in Explorer and Eclipse, but not in cygwin; conversely, cygwin symlinks don't work in Explorer or Eclipse. Pooh.
• all the filenames in your ext3-hosted workspace must be Windows-friendly in terms of length and special characters like ":" or the workspace loaded in Windows throws 'can't find file' errors and you can't save files. Double Pooh.

So far the dual-boot scenario is the best of both worlds, since I can share both features (using Eclipse Extension folders) and workspaces between the Eclipses... along with nearly identical shell access (Konsole or cygwin inside WinTabber), IM/IRC clients (Pidgin or Gaim), browsers (Firefox or Flock), office tools (MSO or OOo).

Besides, who doesn't apologize for Microsoft's stuff? Vista's "so annoying I'll just turn it off" security system? Outlook viruses like the dreaded Mailissa? IE exploits? Security patches that make things less secure? Or even just dumb-ass VBScript bugs?

But c'mon, it's okay to love your linux. It's cool. It's free (as in beer). And suffering is the road to enlightenment, or something like that.

No system is perfect. Just use what you love and tolerate its quirks, or divorce it for something sexier.