> Nearly everything worked out of the box, even when it was brand new.
This is not a common experience. Brand new hardware is especially problematic, but at least much of it tends to get supported eventually. But there's a lot of random junk around that is just very unlikely to get meaningful support.
> This is not a common experience. Brand new hardware is especially problematic, but at least much of it tends to get supported eventually.
Can we actually make that assertion? For the most part, we hear of problems because people are trying to deal with those problems. Only a handful of people will pipe up to say everything worked for them, and it will usually appear in conversations like this one rather than being self-initiated.
I am in the everything-works-for-me camp. In the past, I could have attributed that to avoiding iffy types of hardware and sticking to vendors that usually have well supported hardware (either by the vendor or by the community). That being said, I've had to go out on a limb a few times due to the events of the past year. Each of those hardware purchases could have resulted in switching to Windows. None of them did.
It all leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth about these anti-Linux rants. Are these people who have had a bit of bad luck, and think it's representative? Or are these people who are actively looking for problems to gripe about? I mean, it is possible that I have been lucky. I just find it difficult to believe that I have been lucky for a quarter century. I also suppose that it is possible that I have some sort of gut instinct about what hardware will be supported, but it would be just that. I rarely put much thought into my purchases beyond whether I need it.
Yeah, every amd64 box I've bought recently has had everything working out-of-the-box; weirdly, my desktop actually has much more trouble booting the Windows installer ISO (they ship it as UDF without a FAT32 ESP, so the for-consumers Asus mobo doesn't think it's bootable?)
This is not a common experience. Brand new hardware is especially problematic, but at least much of it tends to get supported eventually. But there's a lot of random junk around that is just very unlikely to get meaningful support.