It's ironic. I have seen some developers programmers gripe about the slow adoption of the tablet, while their own work could help in that area. But the issues of fragmented repositories and missing libraries and other linux-type hurdles hurt mainstream adoption.

A linux-based platform CAN make the mainstream-- but it's gotta hide the hard stuff from average consumers who are, by and large, OS agnostic. So far I can't say this is the case with maemo (although, admittedly, that fact is not just due to developers).

As I've said before, maemo reminds me of the MS-DOS days. You could do all sorts of great things with DOS in the old days (and I did ) but you had to know batch language, X86 registers, etc. Windows plastered over all that, and brought computing in general into the mainstream.

I don't think the OP meant to pick on the work of developers and neither do I. I think the point is it would be better for most if certain conventions were followed. I understand if someone like Gene doesn't care one way or the other, but I'm hoping that apathy is not the norm...