> These are the same people who say they don't want to run Linux because they don't want to compile their sound card drivers. They are already way outside of rational territory and deep into religious territory. In their minds Linux hasn't changed a bit since 1999, even though if you were to compare mac os from that time period against modern linux, they would become enraged at the unfairness and injustice.

In common hardware and software configurations things have gotten way better indeed!

However, if you venture outside of what's commonly available, expect trouble, same as you'd get with FreeBSD and most other OSes out there.

For example, i bought a netbook much like this one: https://techbite.eu/en/laptopy/laptop-zin-3-14-1 because it fit within my price point (a university student at the time) and my other requirements for something lightweight and compact for note taking.

Sadly, upon purging Windows from it (since 4 GB of RAM total made it unusable) and replacing it with Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora or Linux Mint (in approx. that order), i ran into quite a few issues:

  - on some distros (Fedora in particular, i think one or two more) the touchpad didn't work by default, some piece of configuration needed to be edited
  - on some distros (can't remember which), sound didn't appear to be working correctly
  - on none of the distros Wi-Fi seemed to work correctly out of the box

That last bit was especially sad, since the netbook doesn't have an ethernet port by itself, so i had to do an air gapped install of some custom drivers that someone had patched together... but not before discovering that most distros out there don't have GCC out of the box (or some of the other dependencies, can't remember) and that putting it on a USB stick is curiously difficult, when the install will fail unless you also manage to download all of the dependencies that you need for the package and installing all of them at the same time (no CD/DVD drive either, by the way). Oh, and curiously compiling drivers and messing around with DKMS or whatever isn't as straightforward as one might always expect, something about headers and versions and whatnot...

In the end, i got it working, sort of. After realizing that the fingerprint scanner which was working in Windows isn't detected at all as a device on Linux, i just gave up on that particular aspect and took Wi-Fi working as enough of a success for my needs at the time. Also, it seemed like the fingerprint scanning software on Linux had a very specific set of supported hardware, a la sound drivers in these older days.

Now, you could argue that i'm using a configuration that isn't necessarily supported with some seemingly random piece of hardware and you'd probably be right in doing so, since the official drivers were only available for Windows on the manufacturer's site. But i'd argue that it doesn't really matter because the outcome is what's important and what will impact how people feel about the OS.

The takeaway here is that no matter what you do, you probably should stick to the more common hardware configurations and devices out there. And not just in regards to Linux, but also things like your smartphones (my rugged model hasn't received any actual updates in a while because the manufacturers clearly don't care, as it turns out) and even SoC devices (e.g. Raspberry Pi over alternatives, unless you can get a really good deal).

That said, Linux has come a long way and i hope that most of the distros out there will just keep getting better, since Mint + XFCE made the resources constrained hardware pretty usable, as would Debian + XFCE and others (DEs like LXDE or LXQt or whatever). That's pretty cool, in my eyes!