I'd qualify that by saying that, if your time without a computer is money, then don't use linux. As an anecdote, my wife purchased a new laptop last week. The windows activation code they sent us was invalid and microsoft and the vendor spent three days pointing fingers before the vendor agreed to fix it. Their fix was for me to ship the computer back and wait two weeks for them to deliver us a new one. One hour of my time is worth more than she can make in two weeks with no computer, so I just installed Linux and we went on our merry way.

Before anyone from the Apple camp chimes in, I had a similar experience with my old laptop, which was a Mac where the file system corrupted itself every time it went to sleep.

I'm not saying that Linux doesn't get ugly. It does. I've had the failed sound cards and bad printers. Hell, I'm old enough to remember screwing around with trying to get a WinModem to run. It just comes down to whether it's cheaper to waste ten hours of your time trying to get things working or to return to the 20th century for a week while support reformats your hard drive. That probably just depends on your occupation.

cyphersanctus asked about hacking. They want to solve their own problems through cleverness, not throw money to make problems sort of go away. Time spent in a hobby isn't wasted, and hackers should always favor open tools over locked-down appliances.

They want to solve fun problems through cleverness. Not problems like unsupported wifi drivers.