[jiggy2011]

To be fair, most of those things you mentioned sound like issues individual drivers rather than the OS. You are likely to have closed source drivers under Linux too, a variety of GPUs and Wireless cards do not offer open source drivers (or at least with full features).

You might not need 600MB of drivers for your video card, it's that the manufacturer packages it with 600MB of software. On a modern HDD 600MB isn't so much anymore.

BSOD really does overwhelmingly indicate some hardware failure, it is not uncommon for a PC (especially one that is highly used) to develop failures later in it's life. I would suspect common culprits to be your power supply, memory or HDD.

[hippich]

Yeah, I totally agree that major problems comes from closed-sourced drivers. And it doesn't matter what OS you use - Linux or Windows. MacOS it is a bit easier since Apple controls both hardware and software. It is not a case with PC platform in general.