That's a 156 page thread. The result? Ubuntu still doesn't fully work on that particular machine.
And that machine isn't particularly unusual in its class.
It's a considerable amount of work for an average user to get a working Ubuntu, and even after all that work there are still things (headphone audio ffs) that don't work.
This thread is about how people today should move off Windows, and how it is trivially easy to do so.
I agree people should move off windows. I disagree that it's trivially easy to do so, especially for these class of netbook style machine. I think that your advice (basically "wait until the kernel is updated") is proof that there are problems with these machines.
Ubuntu 16.10 wouldn't boot from a USB stick, with some PM error and the CPU watchdog errors.
Fine, go to all the trouble of plugging in a DVD drive, go out, buy a blank DVD. Same thing. The Ubuntu installation media just hangs with an error. Googling that didn't help.
How weaselly. His conclusion is plain to see:
"The result? Ubuntu still doesn't fully work on that particular machine"
You seem to misunderstand that thread.
If you do a stock install of Ubuntu you'll have very many, showstopping, errors.
If you use a custom script that forces a custom bootloader, custom kernel, and a bunch of other fixes, you end up with a machine that still doesn't have headphone audio and some problems with bluetooth.
A self-defeatist attitude won't make this more comfortable. If you don't like that Windows 10 is full of ads and spyware, the time investment to get this laptop working seems pretty small in exchange for a better OS. Throw in a little extra time to get these fixes applied in the form of patches to the relevant projects. If everyone gave up because they can't put a few minutes into troubleshooting and tweaking their setups, Linux will never grow to the threshold necessary to get vendors to support it OOTB.
I never seem to have one of those unicorn hardware/driver combinations that perform well, don't drain battery, don't run hot and don't break on dist-upgrade. I have researched my issues every single time because I would prefer to use Linux for many reasons, but the fixes I find are often partial, temporary and fragile. Eventually I give up and go back to macOS or Windows.
dist-upgrade almost always breaks things for me, especially all those hard fought for fixes. And it's not just minor things that break. Last time (Ubuntu 16.04 to 16.10) networking stopped working completely because some maintainer had decided that network manager should no longer manage wired connections on my particular variant of Ubuntu.
If someone has to do a hundred trivial fixes then you might start to believe that there is something fundamentally broken with whatever software confronts me with a hundred trivial problems.
I'd absolutely love to get away from windows but I tried it multiple times in the past and linux just isn't close to being an alternative in the desktop market. There are so many problems and almost everytime the solution involves doing some arcane stuff in the terminal. This isn't going to win your average user over to linux.
Linux runs on all my servers, where it does an excellent job, but I can't see it replacing windows on my desktop systems, not until they fix some fundamental usability and driver issues.