There was a time when you had to carefully choose your hardware to work with Linux. These days, you have to carefully choose your hardware in order to experience problems.
If 95% of components work on Ubuntu, and your computer life involves 25 components (start counting, you'll hit it pretty quickly), Ubuntu is totally broken for about 75% or so of users. If Mom's camera or wireless doesn't work, she does not perceive the computer as being mostly functional.
I actually did install Ubuntu on my mother's system and haven't had any such gadget shortcomings.
What kind of life of bizarre peripheral addiction do your loved ones live? I can count for myself wired USB headphones, a mouse, a printer, speakers, wireless headphones, a camera (if putting the card into the built in card reader counts), an iPod and... and.. well, that's only seven. They all work with no problem on Linux. What on earth are the other 18 that the average person uses?
We did have a problem with a USB GPS device, but overall the computer is actually lot more functional compared to back when I had to go over and uninstall a new virus and spyware suite every 30-40 days. My mother seems to like Ubuntu a lot, and when I took the computer the other day, she was complaining about using my Father's windows laptop. It was pretty classic, she wrote and said she missed her computer with the 'mozilla fox operating system.
I think the 25 component number is a bit of an exaggeration. Also, you assume a perfectly even distribution among component pairs and that's not the way computers are designed these days. You won't find an AMD box with Intel GMA graphics, for instance.
That said, if 95% of all components work on Ubuntu, maybe 99% of common components work on it, maybe 99.99% of things Dell sells work on it. You're still stuck by that $15 webcam Mom bought at Walmart, though.
all those components come with drivers provider by the vendor of that component for windows(mostly) machine only. Linux doing a great job catching on all those components but the thing is linux is mostly behind. if Vendors helps linux community a little we should be going hand in hand.
Every vendor publishes their own buggy version of drivers for what is essentially the same hardware, all neatly packaged with some buggy "value added" crapware that introduces new and unpredictable behaviour mom has to deal with.
On this Dell Mini 10, X will eventually crash following a resume from hibernate, then I drop to low-graphics mode and avoid doing an actual reboot for as long as possible, just hibernating my low-graphics state.
The only bit of hardware I've had problems with recently is Broadcom wireless cards. Worse Drivers ever. I still won't ever buy one intentionally and when I find one will replace it with an intel or something else that works with out a giant hassle.
I am surprised by how many people do the latter.