Umm I just installed fedora on my old pII 400 (redhat 9 is on my dell P4). After installing on the old computer I found a new burner drive plugged it in and it worked without any configuration. The fact is moder Linux distributions handle hardware just as easily as widows the only are they are really weak in is bleeding edge video cards (a few month delay). My camera, printer, scanner, HD and dvdrom all worked right out of the box on Linux..
The hell of having to deal with libraries was more than four years ago Redhat/Suse/and Mandrake have all packaged in the hardware support..
And on a unix system other than being the root user you can not do a transparent install! You can install plugins and the like in your home directory but they are not system wide (if a kid installs something stupid it will not affect your account).
Good for Linux. It's about time. If you're using both Linux and Windows then you already KNOW it takes a lot more knowledge to run a Linux box than a Windows box. Linux is expert friendly, Windows is moron friendly. That's their claims to fame.