Also, it's true that as you grow older you value time more. And that's why I use linux in the first place. I am faster with it at pretty much anything. The only thing that really drives me mad is skype but my wife has problems with skype also on her windows and mac computers so it's not linux to blame.
That's why there's a control panel for this. Or you can type "xrandr --output VGA1 --auto --left-of LVDS1". As long as you don't buy AMD GPUs, it all Just Works :)
And in 9.04 I had to keep a piece of paper with the commands to reinstall the closed-source NVidia drivers every time the kernel got patched. Apparently I shouldn't have needed to do this, and yet every single update for months would drop me back to the shell after X failed to start.
When I was younger I'd have tried to work out what was wrong. Now I just sigh and are grateful I wrote down the package I needed, and the flag to get it to work from a non-X environment.
But yes, your point is noted.
I used to enjoy tweaking config to get dual monitors to work etc, but now I'm sick of it.
Lately Ubuntu has started screwing up the panel config everytime an update comes. Grrrr!
But I think this is more about me getting old, slow and lazy rather than Linux getting any worse. I mean now, with Ubuntu it really does pretty much work out of the box, even on my laptop (and yes, suspend/resume works).