Funny, I'm on a Linux system more often than Mac or Windows and the carriage returns drive me insane. Also, because the Windows users on my team are the ones that can't manage to figure out how to get their IDE or Git to leave our line endings alone. Our least performing team member dominates our git stats because he repeatedly manages to change nearly every line of code in our project.
Weird, the windows git client defaults to "checkout windows line endings, commit unix line endings" or something to that effect. I do a lot of data analysis and end up transferring text files manually and having to worry about carriage returns all the time, but I've never had that problem with git. There's an easy command line utility called flip [1] that makes dealing with line endings pretty simple. But yes, it is a ridiculous thing to have to worry about.
There's also dos2unix which is a standard package in lots of Linux distributions. It converts from and to Dos (i.e. Windows), Unix and Mac line endings.
I'd recommend talking to the rest of your team to work out a consensus. With git you'll need to agree on values for core.autocrlf and core.eol. Perhaps you can take advantage of the time of year to offer an olive branch?
