There used to be, I feel like things are worse than they were 7 years ago now.
Compiz was stable, drivers were good, motherboard support was better, Gnome 2 just spoke to me in it's looks.
I haven't built a system for a while, but the last one I built won't boot with a USB drive plugged in, the desktop environments were shaky, video acceleration meant playing h.264 videos, and that was a no go. Gallium still isn't working.
Ubuntu 7.04 was for me, the peak of usable, workable Linux vs other OSes. 7.10 introduced a locking while heavy disk bug, and Linux in general has been frustrating since then (I've dabbled in Linux, or run it as my primary desktop for over 15 years).