> Many of the problems people have with Linux have nothing to do with Linux itself.

I disagree.

What the OP is complaining about is the same thing Miguel was complaining about, and it's the exact same thing JWZ called out 9 years in his CADT rant[1]. It has nothing whatsoever to do with manufacturers failing to provide drivers and everything to do with attention-deficit devs never wanting to knuckle down and do the hard, unglamorous work of long-term maintenance and bug fixing.

Working systems (with known bugs) are thrown out and re-written as new, incompatible systems with even more bugs. Everything breaks every time some idiot decides that they'll rewrite the audio/desktop inter-op/init/logging/whatever subsystem because This Time It'll Be Done Right™. This perpetual treadmill of half-working betas never ends.

It gets old.

[1]: http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

OpenBSD actually made a huge contribution here by reverse-engineering binary blobs and writing open-source drivers that could be maintained and debugged, which eventually made their way into Linux. At one time, the wireless support on OpenBSD was vastly superior to Linux. (This is a bit of a tangent, but I think props are due.)

> These problems are simply inherent to Linux being a minority platform.

I suspect part of the reason people spend so much time with advocacy is that popularity does pay off, long term: popular platforms get more support, more applications, and more other people who can help you with your own problems.