Daniel Veillard, everyone who matters loves you. Rude people make their own hell, let them squat in it alone.
I've spent way too much time trying to get my Compaq laptop to do an ACPI suspend-to-RAM. For some reason the /proc and /sys files that are supposed to be used to trigger it (or even cpufreq) don't show up, but it doesn't say why. (But I can use ACPI to throttle my CPU to 1/8 its normal speed, whee.) All the online references advise disabling ACPI and using APM, but then poking the volume-control buttons on the front edge makes the whole box freeze.
I spent too much time, too, trying to get linux kernel swsusp2 to work. It hangs instead of resuming, and I haven't time to triage drivers. (Should I blame eepro100? AGP?) Anyway suspend-to-swap would be way too slow resuming if it did work. There's the reason why BIOSes should boot in three seconds instead of sixty! (Shouldn't an AMD-based laptop work with a Free BIOS? Supposedly AMD works really closely with embedded-Linux people. Somebody with an AMD, please give it a try.)
I spent too much time trying to get IAX softphones (IAXComm, Kiax) built and working. They dial and connect fine (yay voipjet.com) and I hear my wife say, "Hello? Hello?" into our regular phone, but they won't send any audio, even though I can hear the mike signal in my own headphones. Instead, they complain over and over about "PortAudio: read interrupted!". Isn't ALSA and /dev/dsp0 supposed to be mature?
It's strange that hardly any of the current VoIP stuff is packaged in Debian yet.
I spent way too much time comparing Dell Latitude with Apple Powerbook and iBook. The upshot is that (1) Apple still claims a $500 price premium over a more-or-less equivalent Dell, (2) a Powerbook really does give you about the right amount of extra value, for the money, than an iBook, and (3) A Powerbook would be worth a lot more if you could order it with three touchpad buttons. Arrogant gits.
At the shared office where I park my telecommuting butt, they gave up trying to make the regular network connection reliable, and connected my RJ-45 socket directly to the router on their back-up DSL connection. It continued dropping connections several times daily -- apparently every time a script kiddie tried to mount its shares -- until I turned off its pathetic excuse for a firewall. Now connections stay up fine. Don't ever buy a LinkSys router whose firmware you can't override with an image that works.