Reading comments like this, I can't help but feeling that somebody is missing a trick here: I don't doubt your experience, and I've seen similar comments, but they don't match my experience at all, which is that Linux works with no tinkering. It would be really interesting to collect experience reports from folks like you, to see why there is such a divergence, and figure out what could be done about it. Back in the day, the worst cause of Windows crashes was basically a single problem: the quality of ATI drivers were bad, and once that was clear, it got fixed.