The Zaurus is a great machine if you want to do lots of non standard things, but pretty poor if you want to do simple, standard type things.
Absolutely right, though I must add that you shouldn't forget that - from a software engineers perspective - it's the simple things which are really hard to implement.
Shielding the user from the inner complexity is a
very complicated and time consuming task. Consider the simple example of a nearly self-configuring network settings which - upon card insertion - leads you through the configure process by asking a couple of simple questions. To implement such an obviously "simple thing" you need to write wrappers for a couple of different user land interfaces and daemons, you need to write hotplug, pcmcia, and apm glue, and much more.
PalmOS got that right but they use i) a much more simple and less flexible base operating system, ii) worked with much more people and it iii) matured over the years. Essentially an evolution which Linux based PDA GUIs will go through eventually. KDE 1 wasn't simple either, however KDE 3 is something I could install on my mother-in-law's PC.
Unfortunately, the PDA OSS community is fragmented and split up, and has a misratio of developers to users. This doesn't mean that we (as the PDA community) won't get there at all, but it means that it will take a LOT of time to get there - at least if we don't get some paid full time developers or much more part time volunteers.
P.S. Sorry for hijacking the thread again, but that had to be said
