I've been burned by this. It was a result of nVidia deprecating support for my video card in new drivers, and Ubuntu only shipping up-to-date and compatible proprietary drivers in their latest releases. According to Canonical, this was because the nouveau driver has some support for the deprecated hardware and the old drivers were no longer compatible with up-to-date distros.
If that was your issue, there's scripts that patch support for newer distros into the old drivers.
If there are scripts that fix it, those scripts should be run automatically by the installer. Otherwise, it's just not a desktop replacement. I'm sorry to have to say this, but to call it a desktop replacement means it has to:
1. just work
2. failing that, detect the problem and explain what to do. Crashing is just not acceptable anymore.
I do support all the time for the D compilers. In my experience, if the install does anything but "just work", you immediately lose 50-90% of your users.
Every error path in the installer needs to be gone over and engineered to "just work". Messages like:
No desktop operating system meets this criteria though, at least not if you allow user-defined hardware combinations.
I remember I had to do some hackery on a driver to get my sister's printer to work with her macbook/OSX.
I've had all sorts of issues with printers/scanners/random software combinations/drivers/failed automatic update crash loops(!)/etc with Windows.
The only operating systems that might meet the criteria are on tablets and phones (which are obviously not desktops) -- and even then I've had to cross-compile a kernel module to support a wifi adapter w/ USB OTG.
If that was your issue, there's scripts that patch support for newer distros into the old drivers.