It's one person's adventure into alternate methods. Personally, I've never encountered these issues. I just put the disc in the drive, follow the menus and the system is installed. It usually takes less time than a Windows install, plus all available patches are ready to go as well.
I can install a complete system in less than 15 minutes, and I've been know to install linux on several hundred nodes of a cluster in less than 2 hours.
I'd love to explore a world that's not windows-dominated. But you want me to read all this and it's just about installing it? Daunting, indeed.
I wonder why so many people think Linux is hard to install? I have been using it for almost fifteen years now and have installed one or another flavor probably fifty times or more. And during that time I have run into real problems maybe two or three times total. Most distro installers out there are just fantastic. Boot, click and use. Easy as that. Windows, at least up to XP, was the opposite. The few times I have tried to actually reinstall that operating system it was like pulling teeth. The installer design was simply terrible, and there always seemed to be major and mysterious problems. At least twice I couldn't get a successful result of any kind and ended up just putting Linux on as a sole OS. Daunting does not do it justice.