Once I was using thunderbird in some distro of linux, I can't remember. This was up to date, like a recent version of Kubuntu, just a few months ago.

Right I'm in thunderbird, its maximised, I go to close the window, I move my mouse hard up and right. I click my mouse, and what happens.... nothing.

See how the X button isn't at the exact edge of the screen, well I wasn't actually over the X button, so the window didn't close.

What is with calling applications stupid names like "helix player" ?

Infact, helix-player is a replacement for the realvideo/realaudio application in debian testing however it does not play the .ram feeds which is exactly what you would use RealPlayer for? What's the point of replacing it with a newer player only to find it doesnt play what you wanted it for?

Just occurs to me that there is now a 50/50 split of Linux's focus on the future.

Half the people are trying to improve things that imitate (often necessarily!) other peoples' work, half the people are working on innovative new things that do things differently (No I can't think of an example right now), and half the people are working on stuff they really don't need to bother with.

Yes that's 3 halves, thats the way my brain works.

Strikes me that Linux should push a better paradigm, more so than pushing existing ones.

For example(s):

So, suddenly a bunch of sites stop working, didnt even realise they were running on FreeBSD boxes as they JustFuckingWorked, guess the hoster pair.com must have upgraded PHP which broke some packages, no matter probably just a new config parameter to pass in.... nope, not this time.

PHP 5.2.0 Breaks ZenCart, MyBB, Drupal, PostNuke, WordPress 2.05 and many others

Linux sound is ridiculously overcomplicated.

Its also one of the few areas in Linux which experiences a '2UP' - the 2 Universes Problem, notorious amongst Apple and MSW users but rarer in Linux software.

In a 2UP, a given subsystem will work perfectly, usually out-of-the-box, for one set of users, yet fail catastrophically for another set of users, when they are ostensibly using exactly the same software and hardware.

Several applications do not handle a situation where your disk is current fully or becomes read-only, such as NFS situations or your laptop running out of space, this isnt such a big issue as the user can avoid it however it DOES happen, applications such as firefox will loose all of your browsing history (why not just not add any history? I cant see why it would throw out your previous set),

MySQL will give you an "error 28" when there are too many files in /tmp.

Earlier versions of KDE/KDM would get stuck into a KDM crashing loop and you had to reboot

Im sure there are more.