As nice as a working default install can be as terrible can things go with the very same software. I just wasted three hours trying to get lm_sensors to work on a Fedora Core4 install on a different, yet not exotic hardware. While I am convinced it can be made work, I just don’t feel the need to spend 4 days on something that took 4 minutes on another machine. What I really hate about Linux is that it is almost impossible to find out how long something will take. The range is usually between four minutes and four weeks. Just that some things are worth 7. Minutes or Hours, it really depends.
The other thing that I hate about Linux is that people just assume that the whole god damn world knows about their specific prerequisites. Of course you have this, that and the other thing installed and configured so that all these modules do indeed find each other. There needs to be a definition of ‘mainstream’. You go on a web page and see: Supported on mainstream, not supported on mainstream. As simple as that and you already could know if you are in the 4 minute range or not. Of course there is always a fix. Of course it can be all done easily if you just learn this, and install that. And oh, yes, of course you need to get some other things as well with it. Nightmare, that’s what it is.
The fix will be that a couple of ‘distros’ dissapear into obscurity. Would be also nice if the same configuration files would live in the same place on different distros.