It has been nearly a decade since I last ran Linux on my desktop (I think I might have been Ubuntu 6.06 actually), and this exactly sounds like my experience.

It has been nearly a decade since I last ran Linux on my desktop (I think I might have been Ubuntu 6.06 actually), and this exactly sounds like my experience. With a desktop PC, it's generally manageable, but every time I tried on a Laptop (and I have tried several brands) I have had various problems with display/bluetooth/sound/network/power/sleep/hibernation. It also seemed like everytime I did an upgrade, while it may fix one problem, something previously working would break. I even specifically researched and bought hardware that was "Linux friendly" (eg: was generally considered to be well supported). I eventually realized that my desire to run an open source OS on my machine was consuming far more time than it was worth, and I'd rather be getting actual real work done than fixing my display not scaling properly with an external monitor plugged in, or having to reboot because it just came out of hibernation and now can't see any wifi networks. Since then, I've run Windows on my desktop, even when I am 100% working on code running on linux servers (and basically just spend my time in an SSH terminal, IDE or web browser). Apple has the unique position of owning the hardware: they basically have a very, very limited set of platforms to test on, and as a result, it's pretty easy for them to ensure that everything works. Microsoft builds an OS that is supposed to work on all kinds of random hardware from random manufacturers.. They largely take the position that it's up to vendors to implement drivers correctly, but even then Microsoft apparently runs an extensive hardware compatibility test lab and generally spends a lot of time and money making sure it "just works" as much as they can. I have no doubt that crash reports directly feed to this, and when necessary if they suspect some combination of specific hardware is leading to a crash, they likely test it. Linux distros, on the other hand, seem to have none of this. Many of the drivers are open source, created by volunteers because they bought it and want it to work, and still not many vendors put effort into releasing their own drivers. No one tests even close to all the combinations possible, nor as far as I know, is there anyone monitoring crash reports and trying to deal with combinations of problems like Microsoft does. Am I wrong in this? Is there some organization that is putting lots of effort into getting desktop linux into "just works" state? Canonical has some hardware certification programs for Ubuntu Server, but I don't see anything for desktop. For what it's worth, Ubuntu Server from my experience DOES "just work", but they don't have to deal with some of the tricky things like recovering from sleep modes. From experience, today, 2016, if I wanted to run linux on a new laptop and have it "just work" (meaning: zero issues with sleep, networking, plugging into multiple external displays/projectors, bluetooth), what are my options? Is zero issues a reasonable expectation? For the true die-hards, at what point does your ideology of rejecting a proprietary OS become counter-productive to actually getting work done?