Oh I totally understand Linux not being polished on various pieces of hardware. This is acceptable given that the OEM may not be directly supporting Linux on th

Oh I totally understand Linux not being polished on various pieces of hardware. This is acceptable given that the OEM may not be directly supporting Linux on that piece of hardware. What is not acceptable is the "checkerboard" issue I talked about in my original comment: The idea that one version of a distro like Ubuntu or Ubuntu MATE working perfectly on a piece of hardware and the next version being completely broken and then going back and forth with this dance each year. This shows two fundamental flaws with the OS: The subcomponents are not architected well and that there is poor QA practices leading to constant regressions. In my case, in the second to most recent version of Ubuntu, the issue was after a clean install, the desktop loaded correctly but after the first reboot of the clean install, the desktop would begin crashing when attempting to login. As a result, you would be permanently stuck at the login screen unless you dropped to a lower tty and logged in that way. I had no clue what was happening until spending some time researching. Apparently my 5 year old NVIDIA card had some bug that broke some component used when initializing the desktop. This leads to the second issue which is poor QA. Maybe these issues are better on certified hardware? I haven't made the decision to drop a lot of money on specific hardware to find out and from my experience, "certified" hardware is crippled in some way. Whether it is poor keyboard, low quality display, or just lousy config options. While I praise Windows, officially I have three different OS machines under my desk but only really use the Mac for 99% of my work. Every year I go back to try the latest Ubuntu and Ubuntu MATE just to stay recent but these days I usually hit an annoying/serious issue and walk away super quickly. I just haven't the stomach to spend as much times on this as I used to even though I really want open source and GNU/Linux to succeed.