I'm actually somewhat surprised at the number of people writing that Linux saves them time. Clearly not everyone has had the horrible experiences I have. I'm curious what distro you people use and on what hardware. I tried Ubuntu, OpenSuse, and Debian. All of them, excpting Ubuntu, needed so much work out of the box just to get to parity with a fresh windows install as to cost me more than a Windows license. Ubuntu was the least stable after install. Updates would frequently break it. I didn't even make it a week this time, and my past experience with it (LTS version) has been that every few months something new would break after updates.
Yeah, it sounds like you've had some really bad luck with hardware.
Since you asked, for what it's worth, I invariably run Debian-based distros. I haven't touched Ubuntu since they decided to get weird with the interface. This laptop is a ThinkPad X61T running Linux Mint + Cinnamon, which is only "okay" - little laggy at times but it works fine. Surprisingly, the fastest-feeling, stablest, easiest-to-use machine I have is... the ancient EeePC. Standard Debian + MATE desktop. The thing about Debian is, if you can put up with somewhat out of date software, is it just does. Not. Break.
I don't really understand where your problems with multiple monitors come from. I just plug 'em in and they work. It's been a while since I had a desktop with an NVidia chip - all my laptops have Intel graphics - but NVidia's self-extracting installers have always worked for me (although they're built against the kernel so you might have to re-run them every upgrade).
I've had the repository problem you describe, long ago - the UK repos were being weird so I switched to France, which worked fine. Nowadays though all you have to do is use
http://httpredir.debian.org/, which will always serve you the file from the fastest place it's available from. Never had an issue with it.
I guess I won't deny that it can sometimes be a hassle getting things working just right on a fresh Linux system. But at least you only have to do it once.
Ubuntu LTS versions on totally unsuitable made-for-windows laptops (my next one will not be). I've never (touch wood) had an Ubuntu LTS release break during an update. However, I do a fresh install for each LTS release (takes about 45 minutes -- I keep my /home on it's own partition and the new install finds and uses it).
EDIT
And I don't get how a Linux distro can take more work than Windows to get into a useful state. With Linux I just apt-get the software I want and start work. With Windows installing even a minimal python/R/unix tools/compiler/ssh client/office package/tex distribution/browser/video viewer set of software etc takes ages, lots of baby-sitting and frankly nerves as one navigates around the malware.
Debian needs serious help to get the multiple monitors configured and working at full resolution. OpenSuse had that problem plus terribly ugly fonts. It took a lot of reading up online and trying things before I figured out how to fix that. Ubuntu actually had a broken apt-get for me on some recent installs, it turned out to be an issue with using the us subdomain repos, switching to de made apt-get painfully slow, but solved the problem. Luckily I haven't had this issue on my new VM install, so I'm hoping it was resolved. All of them had issues booting (black screen) with the default open-source display driver and required the proprietary drivers to be installed (this is not an issue in a VM.) Just to get Spotify to run on OpenSuse was a herculean effort that I eventually gave up on, but not before buggering up the system.
> Debian needs serious help to get the multiple monitors configured and working at full resolution
I must have some pretty reduced needs. I just use one xrandr command to tell all my monitors what position to be in and it works - and I think my wife uses the GUI program in Ubuntu's Unity desktop without any pain.
> Ubuntu actually had a broken apt-get for me on some recent installs, it turned out to be an issue with using the us subdomain repos
Did you submit a bug report about this? Seems like a bad bug for a distro like Ubuntu.
> Spotify
Spotify is not supported for OpenSuse (it's beta at best on Ubuntu -- but runs very nicely). Trying to run propriety software on unsupported platforms seems like a very bad idea. And of course installing a bunch of random things in random places will spanner an OS. Btw if you want to run Spotify on unsupported platforms I think that there is an addon for Clementine that works nicely and the addon gets installed in your home dir so won't break things (haven't used it for years because the Spotify client works fine for me so things may have changed).
EDIT
I was wrong Ubuntu doesn't install Nvidia drivers for you. You need to install them after install and the process looks annoying.
