The specifics of the post may be written in a troll-like style, but the key points are quite valid - I've had very similar experiences with Ubuntu. Running an "

The specifics of the post may be written in a troll-like style, but the key points are quite valid - I've had very similar experiences with Ubuntu. Running an "apt-get dist-upgrade" update last October entirely hosed support for my (pretty damn common) network card - transferring at anything above about 5Mb/s would lock the network driver. I had to manually discover this, and hand-correct the hosing until they finally shipped a kernel > 2.6.30. The machine is an entirely standard, off the shelf, Atom based PC. Taking the "Could I give this to a non-IT expert" test, it failed entirely. I'm not saying that this couldn't happen on a non-Linux system, but a) I've never had it happen to Mac or Windows b) Trawling support forums and kernel bug lists to discover the cause isn't good enough for end users and c) Waiting 4 months for a non-hacky fix sucks. As it stands, I could never seriously recommend Ubuntu to a non-tech savvy friend. I suppose this is just anecdata, but I'm certainly not alone (another friend can tell you a similar story about sound cards, for example).