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I'm on Debian, supposed to be one of the more difficult distributions to get things right on, and have no problems. Follow these instructions and you will have most of what you need: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=61221

Mepis comes with all the bells and whistles.

Pulse Audio has some problems. Once I dumped it and went back to ALSA. For now Pulse Audio works fine on my machine.

The biggest obstacle to making a breakthrough on the desktop is that Linux has absolutely no marketing or advertising. Of course, there's really no "Linux" desktop as such. It's the various distributions.