That sounds more like you ran in to some random, unfortunate bug more than an indictment of Linux. All systems have bugs like that and yet people don't bail from OS X or Windows as soon as they encounter one.
In addition, I don't think it's a random bug. Having a standard error file that programs are supposed to write to, without any sort of automatic control by the user or (better) the OS is not 'being ready for prime time'