3.6 kernel? Say what? We're at 3.13, almost 3.14 now. And a new kernel is released every 3 or so. 3.6 is quite old now.

One way I get around issues like that is by just not buying hardware that needs me to compile my own drivers.

No idea what was up with the condenser mic, other than maybe pulse audio being retarded.

Intel wifi cards are, in general very compatible.

I'm running Slackware 14.1 and don't have any of those problems.

NetworkManager handles wireless flawlessy, although I had to chase down a module for an old Dynex card with a Broadcom chip I bought several years ago.

I did have a problem with audio stopping output after 20 minutes or so back in 2009 running Slackware 12.x but it too works flawlessly now.

I record stuff with arecord (alsa utility) and if I have to convert it to ogg or something I use ffmpeg.

I've never had trouble with the machine locking up except for svgalib programs that grabbed complete control of the keyboard and then got into an endless loop, but using a watchdog timer would have cured that too.

I've been getting that occasionally with my laptop. Something is causing my Ivy Bridge cpu to not properly throttle back. It's rated as a 2.4Ghz cpu or something, with a 3.6Ghz Turbo, but it wants all cores to stay at 3.4Ghz if theres any kind of load what so ever, on any core. If I load up all 4 cores, my laptop will shutdown after a few minutes.

I've been running Debian on my laptop for a couple of months. It ok, but I can't say I'm impressed by it, even after working through the problems I had when installing it.

The user interface is not always consistent. For example sometimes middle click is paste, sometimes it is scroll. Scrolling with middle click is often inverted compared to scrolling with two-fingers on the touch pad.

Compared to Windows, it's more difficult to get basic information about files with the GUI file browser. Long file names are sometimes truncated (depending on whether they are on the desktop or in the file browser); and the file modification time / date is not lists in the file properties.

It's surprisingly difficult to get some basic OS-wide UI features to work. For example, taking a screenshot, or having a graphical volume indicator appear on the screen when I use my keyboard to change the volume settings.

Some features don't work. For example if I try to 'hibernate' the computer from the log-off menu, it seems to just kill everything I've got running and then turn the computer off. ie. when I turn the computer back on again, it just boots normally and does not recover anything I had open when I selected 'hibernate'. (It's been suggested to me that using a newer kernel might fix that problem, but I don't know how to update the kernel anyway. I'm just using the version that came with the current stable release of the OS.)

Some of the default programs are bad. For example, The GIMP was the default pdf viewer - which is obviously a bad idea. Incidentally, I still prefer 'sumatra PDF' to any of the several PDF viewers I've tried on linux. Actually, there are quite a few staple programs that I use on Windows which I haven't found good replacements for on Linux. eg. sumatra PDF, Notepad++, paint.net, WinMerge.

Some of these things are probably just a matter of trying more software and getting use to working with Linux. But currently, I prefer using Windows.

That's definitely my problem - I never have in 3 years.

I'm a long time Linux user (since Windows 95 came out), and I think that Linux distributions were steadily getting better until around 2010 to 2012, when tabletitis took hold in the minds of many open source developers and companies. Then we started to get debacles like Gnome 3 or Ubuntu 13... I think it's weird but now that Linux is getting slightly popular, the quality actually seems to be less than what it use to be. I fear that there's too much focus on new features and too few on correctness.

On the other hand, many problems you'll have with Linux, especially laptops are due to hardware makers taking various undocumented shortcuts that they then "solve" in their Windows drivers. Of course, this invariably requires the Linux developers to reduplicate the workarounds for these quirks in the kernel and supprting tools.
All in all, I think it's an acceptable price to pay for enjoying the freedom of an open source OS.

One thing I wonder a bout though is this: when I was a young child, radios and other electronics were still sold with a full schematic so you could fix them yourself. What happened to the culture of full documentation of the hardware? That's one thing that I'd like to return.

It's called microelectronics ....my Electronics professor once (when he was showing us that we actually learnt something dissecting a Color TV schematics) said:

Today it would be really difficult to fix electronics, apart from non surface mounted devices...which are a neglibile part of the thing.

I also think that they don't want cloners. I remember reading that the main reason graphic and audio card manufacturers are reluctant to release specs is because it'd be that much easier to reverse engineer their stuff.

Meh, its mostly just management wanks thinking it helps. Any half decent EE can reverse engineer anything short of a 6 layer board... It also helps that China is where all these things are made, so either the schematics are leaked, or the board house making the boards just put through an extra couple runs.

Being worried about some other company reversing your highly complicated modern electronic device means you aren't really trying very hard. You should already have the follow up to the device that's being manufactured in the pipeline so that by the time china has cloned your device, you're starting to make the next one.

In the case of video cards specs, its half that some management wank is worried that their main competitor might steal something (even though their competitor already probably has something like that in the works, and you're already using things that that competitor is trying to hide...) and patent/licensing issues where the real owner of the tech wants everything hush hush, partially so noone can "work around" their patents.

Hehe, I guess you're joking? Most people do, really.

CTRL+SHIFT+T isn't reopening a closed tab in Firefox and now I want to go back to Linux.

[Edit: Ironically it was the logitech webcam software ]

I'll be bald by the end of the week for sure.