> The great thing about a Mac is that I get to have my user level UNIX without having to know anything about the system level UNIX. I don't need to be a sysadmin to run the thing. I get grep and pipes without having to know all the crazy commands to tweak networks settings and display timings and boot scripts.
Luckily, that is basically true for modern Linux as well.
It's mostly hardware support still. As an example, try using a Baytrail/CherryTrail laptop with Windows 10. Now try in Ubuntu. Oh you need Linux 4.11. Oh that's not out yet, so you need to run a bleeding edge kernel directly from git. Even Ubuntu 17.04 is supposed to ship with 4.10 so you'll have to wait until Ubuntu 17.10 before your hardware might be usable.
Before blaming Linux devs for lack of support of new chips I would first check how Intel is cooperating with them by releasing proper documentation in due time.
As a counter-example, try buying a Baytrail/CherryTrail laptop with Windows 10. Now try to install OS X. Oh, you can't since it's not a Mac.
All the time the argument is given that OS X has much better hardware support than Linux, which is just not true. It might be true for OS X on a Mac compared to Linux on unspecified hardware. However, if you constrain the hardware choices even half as much as you do for OS X, that's not the case anymore.
Where this guy updated to say that current ISOs of 16.10 should work...
> Whilst two ISO sets of various Ubuntu flavours for both 16.04.1 and 16.10 releases are provided, I recommend first trying one of the 16.10 ISOs as these are the most recent and incorporate the latest kernel, patch sets and fixes based on previous releases and feedback. In particular, the Yakkety 16.10 ISO kernels support micro SD cards (although with some limitations), includes a patch for I2C bus, has improved RTL8723BS wifi and bluetooth support and most recently I've included support for full disk encryption on Lubuntu and fixed the home directory encryption for all flavours.
OpenSource tends to have a lag time to hardware by nature...but I do believe there was some exaggeration here.
Luckily, that is basically true for modern Linux as well.