I've been using GNU/Linux as my only OS for years, and honestly, I have never had any issues with it; of course I may have other use cases than you, I don't play video games or anything - but when working on a project, that for instance relies on gstreamer, it's better to use Linux natively. VM's have always been a pain for me, they're slow, IO issues, and you'd waste more battery having to run a VM anyway, so the trade off doesn't make sense. Also, how could you say the problem is from users? Why should installing another OS be so difficult? You should give GNU/Linux another try, and try fixing your kernel panics rather than giving up and switching to windows.
One issue though is that people consistently try Linux on a computer built for Windows and say "what the hell, it doesn't work out of the box flawlessly, fuck this".
If you really want to try Linux, you need to buy a computer designed to run it, or at least vet your hardware before a purchase. I haven't bought a computer with a Windows license attached in over a decade because that isn't buying a Linux capable machine - its buying a Windows machine you might be able to run Linux on.
My most recent system was a build I made last year and I vetted every part for LInux support (and boy, did it take a while to verify Asus z87 motherboards had a working EFI that could boot a linux kernel, albeit they have a busted EFI shell and can only have one EFI boot table entry).
Why should I vet my system before buying it? I've seen Linux advertised as "it runs on everything" plenty of times, and for well over a decade. It's rare to see someone who evangelizes Linux to say that hardware support on Linux is inadequate for a non-technical user to just make the switch.
If that is indeed the case I think it would be tremendously important to fix that.
Meh :/ I started with the techrights link, and first looked at the 3rd link, "Installing GNU/Linux is Still Hard Due to UEFI" to learn, and the source article it was based on actually had the writer saying there was no problem at all with uefi+secure boot on, his linux just installed and worked fine on his new laptop. The other two february links weren't much better, at worst an already fixed bug, that did not originate at Microsoft... The FSF link seems more technically accurate as far as I can tell as a non-linux, non-uefi user, but most of their problems are hypothetical and not so much practical problems for now.
Are there better sources to read up on this, or is the controversy a bit over blown?
It isn't UEFI, it is peripheral manufacturers who hate Linux for whatever reason. Broadcom, Creative, Nvidia, and others all have legacies of horrible device support in the kernel.
You can't blame Linus for that. If a company doesn't want to push what is often only a few hundred lines of C to make their devices work under Linux, thats their right. But you can't blame the ecosystem for the companies choices not to support it. It is like buying Nexus 7 and bitching about how Windows doesn't run on it.
All my computers run UEFI if possible, and all of them run Linux.
I have no problems with UEFI whatsoever; in fact, I think it's a nice improvement to the dated BIOS technology. The Microsoft thing called "Secure Boot" might pose a problem, but I never activate that anyway.
People need to stop confounding UEFI with Secure Boot.
There is a distinction here - Linux, the kernel, runs on pretty much every CPU in the universe. If it is presented with any CPU and chipset ever made, it can run on that.
Your PCI devices, your USB devices, etc are not guaranteed to have Linux drivers for that hardware. And if the producers of said hardware don't release driver documentation or support a Linux driver directly, you can't blame the Linux community for not being magicians that can force private companies to bend to their will.
Hell, Broadcom - one of the worst FOSS companies, in the same class as Nvidia for the longest time - is finally producing scant upstream NIC drivers. They support a tiny fraction of their product range, and they have another 2 proprietary drivers on top of those for Linux and those don't work either, but the situation is improving.
But that is all you can do. There is no "sit down and code" answer for undocumented motherboards, bad EFI implementations, and a 15 button mouse with a 50MB proprietary driver on Windows. Well, the latter actually you can just wireshark the usb bus and get all the signaling for the buttons, but that is a lot of work to do what the company itself could have done in minutes (publish the opcode manual they obviously have on the thing).
There are very few laptops that don't come with Windows or OSX preinstalled. They are out there (like Chromebooks) but there's not a huge selection of them, and you have to hunt to find them.
Depends where you are. Last summer I ordered a laptop from Germany and there was plenty of choice, at least Lenovo and Acer machines were widely available without Windows (variably shipping with FreeDOS, or a console-only Linux env).
Saved a tidy sum compared to shopping locally. Just pay attention to KB layout.
