I just set up a linux desktop, first time in over a decade. It was basically a nightmare. Ubuntu-based distros (including Elementary OS, which I had hoped to

I just set up a linux desktop, first time in over a decade. It was basically a nightmare. Ubuntu-based distros (including Elementary OS, which I had hoped to try) just wouldn't find the network adapter owing to some obscure error that took hours to track down any information on. Debian found the network adapter, but the USB devices wouldn't work. I had to tweak the USB bios settings – sometimes it'd work with the keyboard, sometimes with the USB flash drive I was installing from, sometimes not at all. To make USB work reliably I had to set the BIOS to use USB 1.1. Oh boy. Slow, but it worked. It took a lot of fighting to convince the computer to use the network settings I wanted it to. I basically spent as much time turning off whatever-the-hell it was trying to do (network-manager, I'm looking at you), and edit the settings directly. It took about 11 hours to get the thing setup (including the time to download 4 distros). There were many other nuisance and time-consuming issues. All that said, now that it's setup it'll probably run perfectly until it physically dies. The firewall setup, though reasonably complex, was straightforward with ufw. VPN was a bit of a nuisance, but predictable. So it would seem that a lot of effort depends on choosing the right hardware, and I'm probably missing out on some of the newer distros abilities (not that debian is old, but Ubuntu & Elementary OS clearly have had more resources put into the desktop-refinement).