I'll tell you a secret: that fellow was me, every one of several times over the last half-dozen years that I tried running Ubuntu or Debian, in the latest stable version then available, on various commodity laptops not more than a year or two old.
Oh, I suppose my mistake was in not choosing my hardware according to the recommendations of the assembled gurus at linux-laptop.net, or just not being awesome enough to know what incantation I needed to mumble where, or the precise angle at which to incise the throat of the sacrificial chicken, or some damned thing to which those who haven't yet got bored of sysadmin drudgery are welcome.
Of course, the Linux community being as it is the apotheosis of "blame the user", I'm sure I'll hear all sorts of detailed explanations of what I obviously must have done wrong, none of which does anything to make my Macbook any less preferable as an Emacs substrate.
Or... sometimes computers crash, whether they're linux, windows, or mac. That you saw a linux computer crash once is no more notable than the times I saw a mac crash (and believe me, I have).
Anecdata!
Your story is basically FUD because you're describing a kernel panic, which is most likely because the guy was intentionally running unstable bleeding edge stuff. If he was running consumer-level linux stuff, it's very unlikely that would have happened.