If you want things to work better in areas where things are currently more complicated than they should be, you really should check out newish distributions, especially ones based on older ones. They're usually designed with this in mind, whereas older distros are there for the people who are already heavily entrenched. And, for what it's worth, I've never found a method for installing software better than Debian's, and I picked Ubuntu in large part because I wanted an approximation of that.

The floppy example does remind me of one complaint I have about Linux, though, which is that certain older, less popular pieces of hardware - floppies, modems, etc. - tend to get some slightly shappy treatment. It's not that you can't use them (with the exception of whichever winmodems are still unsupported), but it's clear that the developers don't put too much thought into them, leading to unwise defaults, silly bugs, and so on. I can't entirely blame them, as I only remember these devices when I'm visiting my parents, and it's not like Unix has the historical connection with floppy drives and modems that Windows does, but it's still annoying.

Of course, it's an annoyance that I'm more than willing to put up with, and I wouldn't consider it a point against Linux in any situation other than my parents', and maybe not even then.