It’s just that drivers have always been a particular problem with linux, but IMO ubuntu has a very bad track record, because they want to provide it “out-of-the-box” windows style, but this approach gives users very little recourse when things fail.

Other distros have way better driver management, even if it needs some minor poking around.

Can you explain this a bit more? How do you install drivers on, say, Arch, that won't work on Ubuntu? Isn't it exactly the same at the kernel level?