<< since when do mature developers have anything to do with the desktop? you seem bitter for some reason. >>
Consider this.
You have just installed linux. Congratulations.
You go to rebuild a custom kernel. There is a brand new kernel in the stable tree, so you download, configure, build, and install it. All simple steps in the howto.
You then reboot your desktop box, create and manipulate a few symlinks, and suddenly very bad things start happening.
This is not only possible, but it happened. The 2.4.11 kernel mutilated symlink handling, causing inodes to be damaged (IIRC) and abandoned. Very , very bad.
I'm not really bitter, I've just been seeing a large tend towards linux as the save-all,cure-all for PC's, when it seems to cause as many problems as it fixes. (That, and there's a large percentage of zealots, which bothers me occasionally. Read slashdot.org for example. Perhaps I tend towards the bsd zealot side from time to time, but I try to keep that in moderation.)