Probably you used Linux at the time it wasn't very mature. I'm running Gentoo now and never had to reinstall to fix things. With modern computers compiling is very fast, most software compiles in less than a minute. I spend more time solving binary compatibility problems with CentOS (at work) than compiling stuff via portage.

I recently bought a new video card (nvidia), plugged it and then booted linux. It just worked out of the box. Then I proceeded to boot windows, it started on a low resolution video mode because the current driver failed. So had to download and install latest drivers manually. The whole procedure took like 3 or 4 restarts.