> I find it reasonable to spend between a couple of days to a week researching the suitability of something that I'll use throughout the day, every single day for next three-to-ten years. Perhaps my opinion is atypical.

Aargh, this is precisely the sort of attitude that is causing problems in the first place! Of course some research is necessary prior to any purchase, but the issue here is that clear and correct information doesn't even exist in the first place!!

The expectation of nerds that people have this sort of time to take off simply to get a working computer in this day and age is mind boggling. People shouldn't HAVE to take a week to do research to get basic things like this to work.

It's not reasonable and your opinion is atypical for people who have full time jobs with long hours and families to look after. I really want to use and support Free/Libre Gnu/Linux, whilst still being productive. But many Linux users have better things to do than trawl through lspci, do literature reviews of ancient threads on email lists and bug reports, etc, etc, and then finally somehow manage to design a hardware/software configuration that even mostly kind of works. The very worst thing of all is that the typical Linux nerd thinks that this is normal.