Yeah in the future, I will certainly be buying hardware that is designed to run desktop/server Linux (and support features you mention like BIOS upgrades easily

Yeah in the future, I will certainly be buying hardware that is designed to run desktop/server Linux (and support features you mention like BIOS upgrades easily as well) or is otherwise known to support it well. No more random COTS buys for me without research first. I'm done burning hours on this sort of weird crap vendors want to give us. So if a vendor wants to sell me a PC or enterprise anything, it needs to support Linux well. I also don't plan to purchase any brand new Apple hardware. I will only adopt Apple hardware late (and used) and will only run OS X if absolutely necessary for some reason.