Fun fact about sound: I discovered yesterday that one can restore sound on a Ubuntu 11.04 system by killing the pulseaudio process (it will instantly restart and restore sound.) No reboot required, in my case.
This is now one of the more frequent activities I do on my machine. Next step is to make a desktop shortcut or applet "Fix my Sound" or a command-line script, to avoid going through the incantation to find and kill the right proces. Then install Windows.
With the GUIs, problem is that Gnome and KDE and Canonical have gone through so many changes to their config systems (supposedly freedesktop.org D-Bus or something is supposed to fix that, but there is always at least one team starting up a vendetta against another team, and breaking compatibility), and even if there is new stuff that works, there are tons of packages in the Canonical repository that happily edit config that your environment isn't actually using (gtk vs gconf vs dconf vs kde vs gnome, etc)
The thing that surprises me most, and something I'd find absolutely unacceptable to release, is that the stock GUI config tools are broken or do nothing. This is a QA issue. I personally don't care if it took them a decade to properly test and sort this out. You should never release, release level software with broken GUI components like that.
Taking the car analogy further, suppose I tried to turn on my radio, only to find out the volume knob (which I can quite clearly see and manipulate) doesn't work, 2 or 3 days of Googling into it lets me know that there's a new knob, over on the other side of the steering wheel to control volume, that's undocumented, doesn't work properly, and dumps all the petrol from the gas tank if it goes above 7.
The actual way to resolve the volume knob operation is to swap out the radio the car came with with another one, except doing so will cause an engine conflict requiring a new transmission and a green left rear tire. Until of course the radio stops working, which requires you to rearrange the spark plugs in a random order. But hey, the new radio you put in has satellite radio that works so long as the windshield wipers aren't on intermittent wipe...so you can check that feature box I suppose.
Reading the manual for illumination it says: "to lengthen the distance of wave propagation attenuation from the magnetic speaker drivers, rotate the amplitude control clockwise (unless south of the equator where clocks work double negatively backwards <G>)"
Searching the Internet for help always ends up with conversations like
"you shouldn't have bought that radio, every body knows that"
"which one, the stock one, or the new one? I didn't have a choice with the stock one"
"RTFM"
"I did and it's entirely not helpful"
"did you try removing your shoes?"
"no"
"do that, it'll fix it. I have the same car you have, but from 1962, and that's how I solve my tire problem everytime"
"I don't have a tire problem, I have a radio problem"
"that's what you think...."
blah blah blah blah
and in the end we're talking about different cars anyways
This is now one of the more frequent activities I do on my machine. Next step is to make a desktop shortcut or applet "Fix my Sound" or a command-line script, to avoid going through the incantation to find and kill the right proces. Then install Windows.
With the GUIs, problem is that Gnome and KDE and Canonical have gone through so many changes to their config systems (supposedly freedesktop.org D-Bus or something is supposed to fix that, but there is always at least one team starting up a vendetta against another team, and breaking compatibility), and even if there is new stuff that works, there are tons of packages in the Canonical repository that happily edit config that your environment isn't actually using (gtk vs gconf vs dconf vs kde vs gnome, etc)