I just set up a linux desktop, first time in over a decade.<p>It was basically a nightmare. Ubuntu-based distros (including Elementary OS, which I had hoped to try) just wouldn't find the network adapter owing to some obscure error that took hours to track down any information on.<p>Debian found the network adapter, but the USB devices wouldn't work. I had to tweak the USB bios settings – sometimes it'd work with the keyboard, sometimes with the USB flash drive I was installing from, sometimes not at all. To make USB work reliably I had to set the BIOS to use USB 1.1. Oh boy. Slow, but it worked.<p>It took a lot of fighting to convince the computer to use the network settings I wanted it to. I basically spent as much time turning off whatever-the-hell it was trying to do (network-manager, I'm looking at you), and edit the settings directly.<p>It took about 11 hours to get the thing setup (including the time to download 4 distros). There were many other nuisance and time-consuming issues.<p>All that said, now that it's setup it'll probably run perfectly until it physically dies. The firewall setup, though reasonably complex, was straightforward with ufw. VPN was a bit of a nuisance, but predictable.<p>So it would seem that a lot of effort depends on choosing the right hardware, and I'm probably missing out on some of the newer distros abilities (not that debian is old, but Ubuntu & Elementary OS clearly have had more resources put into the desktop-refinement).