I used to use linux distributions all the time. But one thing that bugged me the most was sound issues. Since kernel 2.6.34 and above, my desktop machine never had sound (and this is a 4 year old machine). Plus other things that I hated. The best environment I ever had was Gnome 2. Gnome 3 was not my cup of tea. It has gotten so bad (even Linux Mint doesn't solve my sound issue, and it's odd that older versions run my sound card perfectly) that I run linux instead as a guest on a windows environment. Besides, most of my development tools are in windows nowadays, and frankly, I'm getting a little too old in tinkling around with my system.

I agree that there are some who would claim that spine manipulation heals all sorts of sickness, are clearly bogus. However, I have suffered from cervical slipped discs. I've tried going to the neurologist (who was conservative - doesn't like surgery unless really needed), then who recommended me to a physiatrist who insisted on letting me get on surgery. I told him I'll follow conservative care treatments - traction, which left me in a worse state than I was in (my hands were all numb and painful, aside from my back, and had me gasping for breath at certain times). Upon the suggestion of a friend I went to a chiro (who specializes in neck and back treatments - note that he doesn't claim he cures the world), and went into treatments (he did ask for my x-ray). Now, I am able to do pretty much everything that I wasn't everything to do - I still got about year before I should be able to get back to normal (he said no strenous stuff to allow for me to heal), but practically, almost all of the muscle spasms and pain and leg problems are gone. Moral of the story - don't go to chiros who promise the world.

Having made an ecommerce site from magento itself, I'd say that although it's way better than OSCommerce, it's slow, and very poorly documented. It is as if Varien wanted the poor documentation to happen so that you can hire them for helping set up your site. It is slow because it practically uses EAV for most of it's data. To fetch manually for example, an order, you'd have to parse through different tables to find out what that order exactly is. And the whole system is one big object extension of the Zend framework! Adding APC and memcache makes it work better and faster, but it is still slow. Also, the templating system is daunting, to say the least, for beginners. Also, one big peeve of mine is that it has limited order statuses - shipped, processing, complete, among others, and so far, I haven't found a way to add this reliably (although you can add it to a drop down box in the admin panel, what happens is that you cannot call it through a class) But once you get the hang on it (mostly, since looking at the huge amount of code without comments is very very overwhelming), it can be very flexible. So far, we've made a system to let it contact a fulfillment company for deliveries at the start of every day, and let the fulfillment company update us when those orders were delivered and shipped out. It mostly works too, and it's fairly automated, that we've just left it alone.

Don't get me wrong. I love linux - and I am on a 8.9" netbook running Ubuntu 8.10 (all the software are running well) - except for the fact that I CANNOT connect to my router in WPA secured mode. Until these issues get fixed - and the fact is that the ASUS eeepcs windows and linux versions here in my country have more or less the same price - people will choose the machine with Windows XP over linux. Btw, this machine is worth about $400 and comes with 120Gb, 1Gb RAM, Intel Atom N270 and Windows XP service Pack 3 - I'm just dual booting with Ubuntu here.