I do not know why you think hitting a problem is only bad in Linux. Let me give you an example.
A co-worker of mine has been complaining about word opening documents very slowly after she's been upgraded to office 2007. Some documents opened fine, others took MINUTES to load( a 27kb document, at that). It was driving her nuts.
Guess what. Updating the chipset driver fixed the problem.
How in the whole world would a normal person know that? It took me days of checking for dead network printers, viruses, removing crapware, cleaning the registry, to finally try and upgrade the driver.
Example two: Out of our 30 or so computers in the office, two consistently refused to apply policies after we moved them to the domain. The reason: although the boxes were fairly new, the hardware guys loaded them with old drivers for the network card. As a result, the network started MUCH LATER than the group policy was applied, hence the domain controller could not be found during policy ran at startup.
Windows just isn't made for the common man. I don't know if it ever will be.