[Jare]

Painlessly? Better experience? Let's see my most recent clean Ubuntu install, from a couple months ago, on a freshly bought HP laptop:

- Terrible WiFi performance. Had to find some other drivers and then edit some file to add some magic names to some sort of blacklist so the drivers I found could actually be used. I have no idea how I even found all this.

- Graphics drivers appear to be software only. Find something called the closed source ATI drivers (Catalyst panel included). After installing, Chrome still refuses to run WebGL, and has all sorts of crazy bugs rendering normal web pages.

- Mouse and keyboard apparently freeze after 20 minutes or so.

- Sleep and hibernate are iffy at best, sometimes after waking up, things will just fail or misbehave. One of the things it tends to do is think the battery is critically low even if it's completely charged, something like it thinks there are two batteries and ones is missing.

- The bluetooth util finds some devices (phones mostly), but ignores my lovely bluetooth mini-mouse. Looking at logs, it seems the Bluetooth driver dies during boot.

- Open text-mode vi from a terminal, move with the arrow keys, and I get strange characters. FFS it's 2012 and THIS crap still happens? (Note: bash works fine)

- When I tell it to shutdown, sometimes it does nothing, sometimes it closes the active window and does nothing else, sometimes it actually shuts down. That's from the menu - closing the lid or hitting the power button behaves different each time.

- ACPI function keys: some work, some don't.

Linux has come a long way from the old days when we installed from floppies and hand-edited clock frequencies to set up a graphics video mode, and if I really need a fully functional Desktop Linux box, I can research the right hardware to buy and the post-install fiddling to make it happen. But let's not kid ourselves about the typical experience awaiting Joe PC User.

[devcpp]

My entire beginning programming class had to install Ubuntu and no one even complained about it, with all the various computers in the homes of 60 novice students. Some installed it on their laptops, no connectivity problem. We did a lot of stuff on it, including surfing, coding and watching movies. No software issues whatsoever.

Look, sometimes people have a lot of issues with Windows too. No OS is perfect. But those are not very common instances. I think you are just not lucky.