I left Windows for Linux in 1999 and I do NOT miss how difficult everything was to get working, even with the reasonably user-friendly Red Hat (5? 6?). I even became the maintainer of a Linmodem driver by accident (it was abandoned, the author was uncontactable, and I needed the modem to dial).

I'll take present-day Ubuntu any day. I install it on my desktop, and it just works, GPU and all. I install it on my weird laptop with a touchscreen that swivels 360 degrees and can rotate to a portrait desktop, and it also just works.