It doesn't have to be that way. If you happen to have followed the Linutop evolution, you get an example of how beautiful and glitch-free commercial open source-based hardware can be.

The Linutop software updates have been just that: updates. I have yet to encounter a (major) bug in their system. Also interesting is that the Linutop people appear to actually listen to their users: Almost all of the upgrades had to do with user requests for media playing, video network sharing and DVB-T compatibility.

Linutop is a nice and quiet company, just like their product.