Several years ago (pre-Win7), I tried some of the distros and flavors of Linux. None would recognize all of my peripherals. None recognized my K-World PCTV card. One didn’t even like my widescreen monitor. Some could not recognize the printer. They seemed aimed at geeks and gave only cursory attention to actual productivity.
With the various flavors, it was difficult to determine which one was the best for actual productivity. It took more time to find out the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ of each than the effort was worth.
The same complaints seem to be still true.
Yes, they do seem aimed at geeks, at least to some extent. I used to be kind of a geek myself, but these days I'm totally focused on what I'm trying to do with computers, not on the operating system that makes the resources of the computer available to me.
On the other hand, Microsoft is such a royal pain, between their forced obsolescence and constant pick-pocketing. My company uses Linux on our servers, and all our analytical software is written to compile for a Linux target.
Unfortunately I am constrained to use Windows MFC for developing new algorithms because it's the only GUI I know. I'm not dogmatically against learning a new one, but I only want to learn one. Linux people seem to think that everyone should know multiple distros, multiple desktops, multiple application frameworks, etc. I don't have time to learn a bunch of them before settling on the one that is "the best." I wasted about six months diving into Qt before figuring out that it is a bloated slow mess.