Well, some chipsets, gpus, etc are just broken in the kernel and do not work, and you have to put hours in trying to fix them. I recently built an OpenSuse box

Well, some chipsets, gpus, etc are just broken in the kernel and do not work, and you have to put hours in trying to fix them. I recently built an OpenSuse box for a client, and since there is no "good" motherboard manufacturer for Linux, I have to just randomly hope whichever one I get works. I've gotten Gigabyte, MSI, Asrock, and ASUS boards in the past. Of those, only Asrock supports dhcp online updates to the firmware, which is nice considering most of them supply some shitty proprietary firmware installer on Windows without firmware imgs. So I went with an Asrock board. Now, I know from experience Asrock boards wipe their EFI boot menu when you update the firmware, so you need a thumb drive to boot into a Linux to readd your OS to the boot menu. Their proprietary EFI gui is all right, better than ASUS' in my book. Problem is the board came with a mini-pcie slot, which did come with an Atheros NIC, but something in that pipeline (board -> PCI -> NIC) meant that handshakes would always time on when attaching to wifi. Dmesg was never useful, it would just keep retrying requests without getting responses. And then sometimes it works, randomly. It is probably an electrical problem somewhere along the chain, but considering it was just a perky extra rather than an important part of the system, I'd rather not go through the pain in the ass of RMAing a board to get on back that might work. I think fundamentally the problem is that unless you buy from Zareason / Thinkpenguin / System76 (in the US, that does not have consumer protection laws that mandate systems be made available without OSes like in Europe) you are stuck building your own, and there is no computer you can assemble that whole stack has Linux support. I know that Mushkin and Kingston have SSD firmware updaters for Linux. AMD and Intel obviously support Linux. RAM vendors do not need to care about OS, that is the firmwares problem. But not a single motherboard vendor supports Linux, and that is a real problem.