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From time to time Linux development confuses me. Current Linux distros have GPU accelerated effects on the desktop. When I plug in an external hard drive, it works immediately, but when I add an additional internal hard drive, I still have to edit /etc/fstab manually.

When I switched the graphics card in my Linux PC a few weeks ago, I had to reconfigure Xorg from the command line, because the driver from the older graphic card failed to load (obviously, as it's different hardware). Xorg didn't load the "radeon" driver by itself, even though it was installed. At least it could have fallen back to the Vesa driver.

I'm experienced enough to use the CLI. For me it wasn't really a huge problem. But I wonder about the development priorities from the Linux distributors. Why do they pay people to write compiz etc. to produce eye candy effects, when changing/adding internal hardware components is still a bitch? Do they think that eye candy is more important to common users than getting a system to work? Do they think that common users never change internal hardware after the initial Linux installation that it isn't needed to use the hardware detection techniques used during installation at a later time?
AFAIK many operating systems work like this: During boot a small program launches to check if the hardware configuration changed. If yes, the best driver on the system is loaded and the new hardware configuration gets saved.

To be fair, I didn't try every Linux distribution out there. I did, however, made above experiences with current releases of Ubuntu (7.10) and openSUSE (10.3).
My personal "year of the linux desktop" will be the year when fstab and xorg.conf are no longer needed.