One issue that's been the case in the Linux industry has been hardware support. This is problematic in various Linux distributions because you may find yourself in a situation where your server (or even a laptop) is released with the latest processor and chipset, but no newer version of your Linux distribution has been released yet that includes updated drivers that support it. Unlike platforms such as Windows, hardware drivers are typically built right into the Linux kernel. So, if you have an old release (which would contain an older kernel) you might be out of luck for hardware support until the next version of your Linux distribution is released.
Thankfully, Ubuntu has come up with a system to address this problem, and it's one of the many things that set it apart from other distributions. Ubuntu features a set of updates...