> There are bound to be people on every message board claiming to have run Linux for years if not decades without any of the issues I'm seeing on a daily basis and have been seeing for decades on scores of different laptops.

Unless you think they are lying, it's an interesting observation. It could just be you are incredibly unlucky (a few samples in the global population will have problems, just like a few will never experience any, even on Windows). It would seem to me the distribution hump is rather on the relatively problem-free area (my mom is on Linux since the early 2000's and never had serious issues - of course, she doesn't use off-distro repos, doesn't compile her own kernel and isn't running either Sid or Rawhide), considering most people who run Linux are tech-savvy enough to get themselves in trouble. I myself had a couple desktops without sound in the late 90's but, since I switched mostly to laptops without any fancy components (such as multiple GPUs, smart-card readers, fingerprint scanners, stereo cameras...) I haven't seen a machine that doesn't run Ubuntu flawlessly.