My experience has been quite different. I've never done an install of Unbuntu even in the last few years where everything worked out of a box, whereas Windows a

My experience has been quite different. I've never done an install of Unbuntu even in the last few years where everything worked out of a box, whereas Windows always has. Just as one example I did an install on a new Intel NUC about a few months ago where the wifi worked on 16.04 but not on 16.10. Soon after I installed it on a laptop where the wifi worked but not the ethernet. I think this part of your comment is key: > I have had zero problems that took more than a casual google to solve The problems I have on install are (almost) always solvable in an hour or so of Googling and messing around in the terminal or in config files. That includes the two examples I gave earlier - I've got those working now. But that's an hour for us, people who do this stuff every day. A random person who isn't so good with computers and decides to try Linux really needs everything to work. Even this: > Most people spend their entire time in a web browser anyway, so there isn't much to go wrong. isn't always a safe bet. I installed Ubuntu for someone who basically just wanted to check emails, write documents, and watch some on-demand TV. The on-demand TV site didn't work because it needed the HAL layer in Flash and that'd been removed entirely from Ubuntu. Luckily someone has kindly hosted a repo with the required files[1]. But a random newbie is never going to get that working. Yes, the site requiring Flash like that is a bit out of date. But it still works on Windows and Mac. [1] https://launchpad.net/~mjblenner/+archive/ubuntu/ppa-hal https://launchpad.net/~mjblenner/+archive/ubuntu/ppa-hal