I really believe that what it will take is an actual business that makes actual money selling a laptop with good hardware and an integrated linux install that they maintain. Instead of getting into a flamefest on the ubuntu message board where you have a completely different set of hardware and drivers than the people you're debating, you file a support ticket that the audio on your IntegratedLinuxLaptop 5 seems to have stopped working, and someone at this company figures out what's wrong and patches the exact right driver or system software to fix it. If that doesn't sound like a viable business, well, that's why this is still a problem.