From my experience, installing and using Linux has been the most straightforward, especially compared to windows.
And that's the point: we all have different experiences, so I think it's a bad idea to tell someone they are going to have your bad experiences of they try something new, because better software ends up getting a bad rap.
I haven't had any negative experience with CUPS, and if I had, that wouldn't define my experience with GNU/Linux.
I don't have an issue with you sharing experiences. I do get frustrated when those experiences are used to define GNU/Linux to those who haven't experienced it at all.
There are too many people who hear that GNU/Linux is not for them, when it is really a fantastic alternative to windows. There's an attitude that free software will always fail people (which is not true), and I find that attitude not simply unfortunate, but malicious.
The way that things improve is for manufacturers to see demand; and that won't happen if people don't see free software as the viable alternative that it is.
In a word: yes.
I have at different points used Windows, Linux, and OS X as primary desktop operating systems, so I am not operating from a sense of total ignorance of what other systems are like.
My experience with Linux was that I needed to do far more configuration because lots of hardware wouldn't work right out of the box and needed a lot of tweaking and digging through Linux forums for someone with the same problem. I'm really not interested in doing that kind of thing on my personal computer anymore.