There isn't much a typical user can do about it, if the machine they use turns out to be one of the difficult or unsupported ones (drivers/hardware or OS support (Kernel etc..))phidias81 wrote:I'm not a programmer, but I don't consider myself even abeginner, so if I have all of these problems, I can't imagine an average user
The number of average users with average hardware that are able to use Linux as their main OS is many
--it all depends on how much info a user gets before making a plunge; so avoiding any difficult PCs (latest hardware or integrarted video cards, such as Intel HD) and such will help enormously
As well one could check the status of working product lines by either going to info sites or specific forum distributions, such as Ubuntu or Arch (for good technical explanations and useful information) or some others..
http://linux-laptop.net/
http://linuxhardware.net/linuxhardware/notes/
http://www.linux-drivers.org/
http://linuxhcl.com/
http://linuxpreloaded.com/
http://emperorlinux.com/
--I like Emporer Linux, since they tell you waht they do to make Linux work on a system they supply (notebook(s)), but they tend to be expensive as compared to System76 (but I would say better at the job!)
And so on