Am I the only person on the face of the earth who feels like they've had many more technical/reliability issues with Linux (perhaps the blame lies with distributions in particular) than with Windows, over less time?
Nope. Not as a desktop platform, anyway. Ever since KDE3 went obsolete, Linux on the desktop has been a joyless pain for me. Windows is more reliable, and OS X is generally more "usable" in terms of nifty things it can do.
Part of that can be blamed on crappy proprietary graphics drivers, but only part. Most of it is just a decade or more of mediocre design.
You should try KDE 4. Actually is very madure and more comfortable of using that Windows, also is reliable as actually is very rare to see a serious bug, and if this happens, KWin/KDE recover itself alone in seconds.
The only problems that I have (sometimes) actually with Linux are graphics drivers.
I hope this isn't being downvoted simply because TillE isn't fellating Linux. We all have different experiences here, and while I'd be interested to see elaboration on this comment there really is no reason to hide it.
Sure no; but 97% of OS problems are hardware problems and OS/X and Windows are lucky to have hardware makers care to optimise their product for them. Still, with some research _before_ buying you can get a perfectly flawless Linux experience. And if you are lazy, there are rare but still options already baked for Linux, even from huge vendors like Dell.
