I've had Ubuntu running on my old desktop for a few years now. It's literally a 50% chance as to whether I'll be able to get the GUI login screen to come up, and be able to log in successfully on my first try, without having to ssh in from another machine and fiddle around with things.
Are you running the nouveau driver? If you are, know that it's notoriously unstable and crashy, especially older versions of it.
I've installed and run Linux on many computers over the past $WAY_TOO_LONG. Anecdotes aren't data, but your experience is an outlier these days.
Regardless. I gather that you're trying to slyly imply that your bad experience with Ubuntu means that Free Software is synonymous with low quality or something.
There are many Ubuntu installs that "just work". If this is your "old desktop", then it sounds like you probably didn't set out to purchase hardware known to work well with Linux.
One broken machine isn't an indicator of much of anything.
This isn't an exaggeration. 50%.