There are no magic elves and fairies lower down in the stack. Reliable user experiences come from a) Reducing degrees of freedom - remove the number of things

There are no magic elves and fairies lower down in the stack. Reliable user experiences come from a) Reducing degrees of freedom - remove the number of things the end user can tweak / change (the mac way) b) Monopolistic fiat - Publishing standards and strong arming vendors into supporting those (the wintel way) Linux tries to approximate reliability using a "many eyes make bugs shallow" approach. However this kind of reliability is stochastic. Think of it as a gaussian centered around the defaults that ship out of the box on hardware that is fairly commonplace. The more you push your end config away from that center the more likely it is that you will have a suboptimal experience.