The thing is, these complaints usually come from people who WANT linux to succeed on the desktop. I'm certainly one of those people - one of those poor unfortunate souls doing RoR development on a PC.
Windows isn't a great option for me because the development ecosystem around Ruby on Windows is still fairly immature. Linux would be a perfect solution, if I could get more than a hour of battery life out of my laptop, my touchpad worked even remotely as well as it does in Windows, and selecting the wrong update didn't completely trash my system.
Give up or don't give up, but agonizing about it accomplishes nothing. 6 months ago I received a new laptop that "just didn't work on Linux." I did a lot of research, tried different distros, hacked on it a lot, and now it is a dream to use, gets excellent battery life, and even suspend/resume work beautifully. Hackers don't agonize over this kind of shit, they get to work. If you don't want to invest the time, your choice is investing your $$$ in a Mac. Personally I am so happy with my laptop now that if someone offered me a brand new Macbook Whatever, for free, I'd say "No, thanks." Seriously.
Well, you also have the bias of wasting several weeks of your life trying to set up a laptop.
Yeah, I said waste. Most people will counter by saying "but I learned linux!" No, you didn't, you learned to futz around with a bunch of conf files. I remember trying to make Pulseaudio work with my USB soundcard. Several hours of dicking about with asoundrc later and I
a. still had a nonfunctional sound card
b. still don't know how pulseaudio works
Not that it isn't an accomplishment. Just, while it may be a source of personal satisfaction, don't expect people with less time than you do to feel the same way!
In my case messing around with conf files improved my understanding of those specific components (acpi, xkb, alsa, modprobe, etc) and the system. By your logic what learning experience isn't a waste?
I feel you on pulseaudio though. Been there, done that, pacman -Rcs gnome gnome-extra. That took me minutes, not weeks. Because I had already learned to configure alsa, and knew it worked fine.
The overall point is people without time to learn probably shouldn't use complex systems? OK.
Windows isn't a great option for me because the development ecosystem around Ruby on Windows is still fairly immature. Linux would be a perfect solution, if I could get more than a hour of battery life out of my laptop, my touchpad worked even remotely as well as it does in Windows, and selecting the wrong update didn't completely trash my system.