I'll be the first to admit that I'm definitely a Linux fanboy, and am totally biased, but while yes, some distros require a lot of configuration, but others, like Mint and Fedora, just work. The only major issue I've ever had with those was, on rare occasions with niche WiFi cards or very new ones, missing WiFi drivers, which are available separately and can be installed pretty easily with just a quick Google search.
In my opinion, it's much less time to configure and get Linux working than Windows. For example, just last week I was on Debian, but then I decided I wanted to switch back to Fedora (just some minor preferences, nothing major), and I was able to reinstall and get back up and running within an hour or two–including reinstalling programs. And I had a separate /home partition, so I had all my data separate and just switched out the OS.