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 wonder if I even have a working CD/DVD drive around somewhere. Installs and upgrades are all PXE or editing grub to boot the install image. So much faster (or it was, don't know what media speeds are these days).