Came here to say just what you did. From 1998-200+ I installed literally hundreds of different linux OSes hoping that "this one would be the one". Sadly I spent even more countless hours finding and debugging drivers and generally failing at my attempt to find something to replace or even run alongside Windows (every geek I knew duel-booted another OS).

So yes on paper Linux had/has everything Windows does but in practice it was another story. It arguably still remains the case even today which is shocking considering how longs it's been.

Most of it is related to drivers and hardware industry support which will never happen until the other dominant players (Windows, OSX) stumble.