Mac / Cheerio
I take your point, but I have three shorthand notebooks full of the records of what I did and what I tried to make things work under Linux. If you search the various Linux forums for "Keef" you will find me asking simple (maybe even "idiot") questions that had me baffled, and being told I'm a blithering idiot (which I knew already). But the flamers seemed not to know the answer either - which is a trend I've come to recognise.
The "master" machine in my study is a 3.2GHz Win XP Pro box. There are a B&W laser printer and a colour inkjet printer attached. Both are shared on the network (Netgear wireless modem router), and my laptop running Win XP Pro can print on either printer just by checking which one to use. I can do that from down in the lounge, via the wireless link, "just like that." Debian on the Linux machine, hard-wired to the network, can now see the Laser printer but not the inkjet. It took me several months to get that far. Fedora can't see a printer at all, and SuSe...
Setting up Samba to allow the machines to see each other and swap files around needed some geek-code to be entered into various files in the root directory (smb.conf, bootmisc.sh, /etc/udev/rules.d/local.rules). I won't tell you how long it took to find out that those were the ones to edit, or exactly what geekery to put in. I've got it all written down now, so next time it'll be easy.
The SCSI CDROM drive was a bundle of laughs. Sound and video were both nightmares - trying to recompile the "core" with the right "soundcore", for example. Then it would only display 640 x 480, and I had to find out that the place to edit is /etc/X11/XF86Config to add the instructions to use 800 x 600 and 1024 x 768. Nothing difficult - just a case of finding out where the geek-code goes.
Yes, I could use the Linux box now as the office machine, provided I didn't want to print anything in colour, or scan anything on the SCSI scanner. Yes, Linux now is far easier and more user-friendly than it was a couple of years ago. It's a steep learning curve, that's all.
When I bought the new Windows box in January, it took me about four hours (from start) to have it all up and running, doing everything. I didn't have to edit any config files. OK, I know Windows better than I know Linux. But for me, Linux did NOT work "out of the box". Far from it. Maybe I'm just unlucky.