I just buy the hardware I want, assume it will work, and find that it does. Maybe I've been getting lucky, but I don't think so.
The only real remaining pain in the ass is printer support, but who the hell uses printers these days?
Even then, if you stick to ALSA applications, you'll have a few issues:
1) You're going to be limiting yourself to a lot less possibilities (Skype uses Pulse, IIRC, for example)
2) You can't have simple settings such as per-application volume control.
Sure it "just works", but it does if you use a set of programs which only the people who say "it just works" (a lot of people, I know) restrict themselves to. While it may work for you, different people have different needs.
I'm still waiting for the day Linux audio (and video, but less hopeful because of proprietary drivers) simply works in the same way it does under Windows/Mac.
Footnote: I completely forgot to mention latency issues, which is awful for audio processing.
Can't say I've ever noticed Pulse latency, even while playing Quake, except when using Pulse's networking features. Maybe I have crude ears.
It may not represent the typical Linux users, but while audio processing also doesn't represent the typical PC user, it works under mainstream operating systems. Until such a simple thing also "just works", I won't be happy with sound on Linux.
Basically, I'm from the group of people who want things to work on Linux for the same use cases they work on mainstream OSs before I state that it "just works". I believe saying things "just work" only because it works for most of my needs is detrimental, as it gives a wrong image and may frustrate people trying to do something different , as it has happened to me in the past, I've caught myself trying to do non-standard things a lot (read: most) of the time.
There's a ton of Windows applications that take over audio and do a lot of driver weirdness. There's still ASIO incompatibilies, latency issues, etc. In fact it happens in the same space where PulseAudio and JACK intersect on Windows.
Wasted a whole day at work with that one. The nVidia drivers don't support framebuffer consoles, only VGA, but UEFI doesn't provide VGA console I/O. And an encrypted disk needs human interaction to type the password in at bootup, meaning some kind of graphical support. Meanwhile, the non-proprietary drivers crash the X server if you so much as jiggle a window about.
Your best bet with desktop Linux is still to buy old, cheap, common-denominator hardware. Anything recent is a gamble unless you're very technically adept or have access to professionals.
Not with proprietary drivers. AMD/NVidia's failure to produce usable drivers of their own isn't particularly relevant as far as I am concerned. In fact, it serves to highlight just how good the the FOSS drivers are at "just working".
"Meanwhile, the non-proprietary drivers crash the X server if you so much as jiggle a window about."
That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Frankly, I do not believe it.
All you had to do to crash X was move a window quickly from side to side. The proprietary drivers are infinitely better in so far as they don't crash.
With my ATI graphics card on my desktop I have a script that runs on startup to force the display drive to to detect my 1920x1080 monitor otherwise it displays the screen with big black bars all around the edges.
Audio and video are still a pita for me.
sudo amdconfig --set-pcs-val=MCIL,DigitalHDTVDefaultUnderscan,0