This may be more of a rant than a question, but I'd appreciate any efforts to enlighten me. I was going to put it in PC-connectivity-manager thread but I think it's more of a general question/observation.

First I'd like to thank all the very capable people here who contribute what must be vast amounts of time and trouble to contribute to open source stuff like Maemo.

I got my n810 a couple of years ago but didn't do much with it because, among other things, it couldn't talk to my network so it was pretty isolated and limited as a useful device. When I bought it, I figured that having a Linux-based OS would make it more adaptable and useful because of the open-source community flogging away at it, even though I'm not into Linux myself.

I've just begun trying to figure out how to get it to talk to my XP PC, to get some more use out what is a nice piece of hardware, if a bit antiquated. My point here is that I'm staggered by the amount of fiddling that accomplishing anything useful with the device seems to require, and I'm wondering if I'm just naive, or what exactly are the reasons why this stuff seems so hard?

My example is PC-Connectivity-Manager. Without an obviously major effort by the developer to package it and write thorough instructions, it would have been literally impossible for any mortal to figure out. As it is, the server install to the PC took 20+ minutes, wrote what looked like hundreds of individual applications to disk, and it STILL needs to be configured and tuned.

Same on the client end. It's changed all kinds of stuff on my n810 and I don't know if I hit all of the 97 steps necessary to get all the required stuff on there in the right order. I will be studying and fiddling with it for the next month, I expect. I'd rate myself as modestly tech-aware but this stuff seems unbelievably complex

Not to speak heresy, but I have an ancient IPAQ that still serves a lot of my mobile needs, if slowly. It syncs, views network shares, and streams media pretty much out of the box (although it sucks at internet, which is what I wanted the n810 for). I'm not comparing Maemo to the Evil Empire, I'm just wondering if all the stuff I had to install today is invisibly under the hood of 10-year-old Pocket PC 2003 or is it just a lot more complicated to make Maemo talk to Windows?

Maybe I'm just coming to appreciate how much wetware it takes to hack stuff, but I'm simply stunned by how complex this is. Or am I missing something? Is there an easier way to just get this thing on a network?

-gryvn