Gunner Asch writes:

My biggest issue with most versions of linux, is that few of them will
handle an external modem properly.

No..not Internal, which is another issue..but EXTERNAL ones.

Not unless you are a Linux whiz and go script writing

I'm very, very surprised. I can't speak to recent events (thank God,
I haven't had to use a modem, internal or external, in years), but
that seemed like one of the things they got right very early.

I was using minicom sometime in the last millenium (making my machine
look like a plain dumb terminal), and a standard ppp daemon to talk
IP-over-PPP for years after...

I'm a happy debian user, FWIW.