what distros have you tried? last 2 years have gotten rid of most of the pulseaudio/alsa annoyances, i didnt have to do any configuration on multiple machines (xubuntu 14.04, manjaro). i have one machine with an amd e-2000 that requires the nomodeset, which was annoying to fix, but that's also a pretty niche system. Overall my impression is that most hardware works out of the box pretty nice.