"...you have to type the "admin" password every few minutes (or sometimes less) if you're trying to set anything up. Installing software is (mostly) a nightmare if you don't speak "job control language"".
Hmmm... Well I usually go to Computer Administration" and "Install new software" or their equivalents and choose "Install new software", point it at the RPM or deb file, give the admin password when asked for it and off it goes. I had to Google for Job Control Language"....!
Some of the people on Linux forums can be just as you say, but you'll get good help more often than not.
"The one I have (Debian) is pretty solid and stable, except that most of my peripherals don't work (ie printer, soundcard, scanner, webcam, and joystick). Some can be got to run by opening a command prompt and typing a load of JCL at it - but that only works till you reboot the machine, then it all has to be done again. I tried to write "startup" batch files to do that automatically, but it doesn't seem to work like that."
Odd. Ubuntu is Debian based and it picked up all my peripherals permanently on install and they all work. This JCL thing is starting to confuse me!
"But the network interface (called Samba) is something else. After about three months, I managed to cheat it enough to get it to talk to the other machines on the network and transfer files around."
I found SAMBA confusing when I started working in a mixed environment - it took me a day or two of tinkering to get everything tickety-boo. Most modern distros have a nice GUI for configuring SAMBA and you don't have to tinker with smb.conf
"....Kpackage..." I haven't used this particular package manager but most of my install packages work just fine. You can indeed have dependency conflicts that are a pain in the arse, but if you stick to stuff from the package depository designed for your own distro you should be OK. I presume you're not compiling from scratch!
"...At that point came the time to upgrade to the new release that promised lots of fixes for the "doesn't work" items."
Hmmm. SuSE at least upgrades pretty smoothly in place, as does Ubuntu, but you certainly CAN hose the system and need to reinstall though I haven't had to for quite a while.
"At my age, life's just too short..."
I sympathise. In exchange for getting an entire OS and software for everything under the sun for free you have to invest a bit of effort. Sometimes it's easier to pay the money, accept the chains and just do it. Your choice.
Linux is now a very long way from where it was 5 years ago when installing started with creating a bootdisk and a rootdisk and compiling lots of stuff yourself. In another 5 years it'll put Microsoft to shame.