Suppose your OS has a problem with a certain type of monitor... under the wrong circumstances, the display gets out of sync and becomes blurry. How do various OSS groups address the problem?

Linux/CLI: the initial post on a support newsgroup is soundly ridiculed by 16 people, one of whom tells the poster to "go back to windoze, n00b!". A teenager in Kazakistan spends 10 minutes coming up with a 100-line kernel patch that he submits. Core kernel developers review the patch and reimplement it as a 2-line fix.

Linux/X: the initial post on a support newsgroup results in 16 messages, each one explaining how to edit config files to address an entirely different problem. Someone eventually documents how to fix the problem, but the response actually ends up in an entirely different thread. The next person with the same problem is told that they obviously haven't searched the archives.

Linux/KDE: the next point release includes KMonitorSync, a stand-alone application capable of fixing this and 20 other monitor-related problems.

Linux/Gnome: developers discuss the problem, then spend two years creating a "monitor adjustment framework" that eventually becomes a distributed object framework. This is scrapped, and someone writes a 100-line command line utility and a 10,000-line GUI wrapper.

Windows: documents the problem in a KB article, and eventually includes an unannounced fix for the problem as part of a Media Player DRM update.

Apple: realizes that this is a bug, and releases a fix as part of their next point release. The UI used to fix it is only documented in the release notes and 3rd party "Mac OS X Unleashed" -type books.

BeOS: already automatically detects and corrects the problem in a way that improved monitor resolution by 15% and increases the functional life of the monitor by 25%. Neither of the two remaining BeOS users notice, though.

AmigaOS: announces that they are aware of the problem, and while they don't intend to fix it in this release, their release next year will allow AmigaOS to run on a 4-bit microcontroller connected to a 40-inch plasma display.