Actually, what would best describe it is that you have been terribly unlucky.
Every single computer I installed Ubuntu, since the 6.x releases, has worked flawlessly with one exception - an IBM desktop that has a buggy HDD controller that requires some time to properly boot. One line in grub and it was solved.
And that was it. The only glitch I ever had installing Ubuntu.
I've had a couple of problems here and there with configurations.
The worst one was my fault : I edited my crontab on ym home machine, and sent it by sftp to the server and put it in /etc. Everything was fine, until a week later I did a routine aptitude upgrade.... and then I woke up to find out my cronjobs hadn't been running for the past 9 hours.
This could be like a riddle! But well, what happened is I had non-root ownership on the crontab. When cron restarted, it saw this, logged an error and refused to budge another inch.
I've had a few other configuration related errors, to. We run a pretty tight company (in terms of, no time to do anything extra) and so I'm wary of inadvertently changing some vital configuration that I haven't thought of in a year or two.
