My point was that anecdotes are pretty useless. Some installations run brilliantly, others are a huge pain. After all, we're not talking about a single distro

My point was that anecdotes are pretty useless. Some installations run brilliantly, others are a huge pain. After all, we're not talking about a single distro on identical hardware. To answer your questions- Linux is my primary OS, at work and at home. I don't recall every single issue, especially way-back, but traditionally, I create problems by doing something stupid. Maybe I'm just lucky with updates, but I stick to popular distros, and I specifically seek out Linux-friendly hardware. Others surely have a different experience. It just felt like OP was painting with too broad a stroke; their statement was valid in 2003, but not so much these days.