My counterpoint: as a full-time Mageia user on my laptop/workstation since 2011, my linux configuration knowledge has atrophied to the point of near-uselessnes

My counterpoint: as a full-time Mageia user on my laptop/workstation since 2011, my linux configuration knowledge has atrophied to the point of near-uselessness. Mageia is the first and only distribution I've ever tried that, on a variety of hardware, Just Works. Every hardware feature works out of the box, and with as little surprise as you'd expect (e.g. plugging in a monitor, using wifi out at a coffee shop, plugging in a printer). I've even done the distribution upgrades (e.g. version 3 to 4), which I was always scared of, and somehow those too just work. I literally cannot remember the last time I hand-edited a config file (not counting Apache configs on a Linode VPS with Ubuntu Server). I've had a chance to use recent versions of OS X, and I even experienced more crashing (not a lot, mind, but my linux laptop never crashes) than on this stock HP with mageia. Happy that you've found a solution that works for you, but I'm also extremely happy that I get to keep using Linux without spending one more second thinking about hand-editing configs! :)