By 2007, most of the nasty stuff has been sorted out (I met with Linux in 1998, started to use it full time by 2003).

Some things I have experienced (not all hardware related but, notable and crippling):

  - Additional SATA controllers had intermittent connectivity issues with Samsung SpinPoint drives
  - Same additional SATA controllers' 2 port models were fine but, same chip's 4 port model was not recognized at all.
  - Intel Speedstep was wonky.
  - CPUFreqd needed hand tuned scaling profiles for good on-demand scaling.
  - Fedora 4 mysteriously tried to redirect all my internal X11 comm via my physical Ethernet card. Needed to add an additional card as a primary network interface to solve desktop latency problems.
  - One of my systems was unable to boot any OS installed on the non-GRUB drive. GRUB was unable to fire anything on that disk (regardless of OS brand, model and make)
  - My latest system's on board Wi-Fi and BT adapter was unusable for 2 years.

I possibly had many more small problems and I either worked around that or a BIOS update came to remedy that to my luck. 18 years is a long time. :)