To be fair, one couldn't have even said that much about Linux a decade ago even though Linux ran on the same hardware as Windows. Now we can say that we can do Windows gaming on Linux and it is amazing. It is possible to both play a huge swath of Steam games under Linux, with comparable performance to Windows, and to go the "a lot of effort" route with non-Steam games under Wine (again, with comparable performance to Windows). That's before considering native Linux games.
It's funny how what people consider "a lot of effort" varies through the years. As a kid I was cracking open my apple-clone 5.25" drive and trying to manually adjust the drive speed with a screwdriver, with absolutely no documentation, internet or other support to help out - just to get a game work!
You're right. Even though I was thinking along the line hardware and software compatibility, repairs certainly fit the bill. It's not like today, where a flaky drive is simply replaced. A floppy drive of that era costed as much as an entire computer today. And let's not forget the MS-DOS era, when people were pretty much expected to tweak their system's memory configuration to play games (and different games required different profiles).
Out of curiosity, does kid-you remember whether the drive came poorly tuned from the factory or if it drifted after the fact. (Or perhaps it was the disk at fault, having been written on a poorly tuned drive.)
