A Nouveau graphics driver update

Most of the sound issues have gone away since the sound card market kind of went away (outside the "pro" market) - everything's integrated these days, which means there's a much smaller set of things that need some level of support, and they generally come from larger vendors. So sound mostly "just works" now.

Graphics is a /long/ way from getting to that point, though it's not /that/ hard to pick hardware that will likely work out of the box. There are really only three vendors to worry about, and two of them work pretty well with Linux - if you get a laptop with integrated Intel or AMD graphics you're probably not going to have many issues (though that's far from guaranteed). But the graphics market includes crazy shit like Prime, which is a nightmare to deal with sensibly - I've got a laptop with an NVidia card that's got perfectly solid (if proprietary) driver support, and an integrated Intel chip that's really well supported, but the combination falls over regularly.

Obviously the server side is different, but in that market Linux is the 800 pound gorilla. Consumer markets, not so much . . .