By the way, your handy thumb drive with four drivers on it -- why did you need that? And why did you have it? Why weren't you that well prepared for the Linux install? It doesn't seem like a fair comparison if you're comparing a Windows install where you knew exactly what drivers you needed and already had them on hand to a Linux install where you hadn't even Googled the right driver for your video card.

I was that well prepared for the Linux install. I had CDs burned with multiple builds of the drivers, thumb drives with multiple builds of the drivers, hell, I had an entire other computer available with working access to the internet, I spent 3 days trying to get things working which are so not even a problem on other systems. Is there some super human level of support I should have had available? Should I have built a time machine and brought forward the Oracle of Delphi and Alan Turing?

That's the point. If you read this thread, and the rest of the topic, the common factor is that Linux fails to work out of the box on regular old systems on perfectly normal hardware.

The windows I installed was regular old, bought in the store windows. The hardware was off-the-shelf in a system I built myself. Nothing exotic (even if the system was 2 years old at the time). I installed it, it "just worked". When windows doesn't it's clear, or resolvable in 5 or 10 minutes of googling, with reliable and repeatable paths to resolution, and the system is usually able to run in a reduced function level of operation well enough that I was able to patch it up with fairly minimal fuss. Yeah sure, there's some deep voodoo that Windows bluebeards know, like how to path a registry by hand or some nonsense.

I was able to get the same distro to kinda work on another machine. But I eventually uninstalled it because, while it "worked" it was "not quite right".

Since the mid 90s, I give this a go every year, to see if their is a popular distro that's up to claims of "just works".

I've never gotten a distro to "just work" and gave up after days in disgust. Video drivers don't work, common peripherals, like keyboards, don't work reliably, audio has never worked right, I've brought half working machines to LUG meetings hoping some greybeard could coax something out of it to no avail. I've worked in hardware shops with virtually unlimited access to any sort of hardware you could imagine and after weeks of banging on the machine been unable to get something as basic as syncing to a monitor to work correctly. Stupid things like identical video cards eliciting different responses from the system.

What has improved? The install and available software. I remember 6 or 7 years ago, getting past the install was seen as a major requirement for acceptance on the desktop in the community. And coinciding with that having decent productivity software.

I think the community has stepped up and more or less gotten those resolved. But useless or nonexistent GUIs, random config files floating around from distro to distro with help docs that are out of date and have no bearing on what's actually in the files let along where, or what the configuration options actually mean, broken default packages, updates that break simple regression testing, etc. All fail to impress.

I've used Linux systems at times to save failing Windows disks, or rest system passwords on NT machines, and other utilitarian sorts of things. In embedded systems I own, where Linux is running as a ground up build for that specific hardware, it runs brilliantly. I have more Linux systems in my house than I do Windows for example. But unless problems can be reliably resolved in 1-2 hours, it's a no go.

I'll never understand why people have an issue with a singular piece of hardware on a Mac or a Windows machine and use that as an excuse to move to Linux, and then tolerate an absurd and constant barrage of completely solved problems (on other systems) every day.