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But what if in installing Linux you have to spend even more time fixing it and getting everything to work right?
Install Ubuntu.
Just built a gaming pc for my wife. Installed Ubuntu. Everything just…worked? Even wireless drivers.
Install steam. Go through menus to enable Proton. Install Hogwarts Legacy. Works fine.
Most I had to do was edit a single text file to get her 8bitdo controller to work.
That was where I started before I went distro hopping on my test machine. Ubuntu had a really annoying issue where the fingerprint reader would randomly stop working waking up from sleep. Going into sleep sometimes just didn't work, and battery life was also pretty awful.
It depends on your use case, do you have non-common needs like specialized software that may not work out of the box?
Specialized software like my audio drivers?
Yes, since many of them work out-of-the-box today. My PreSonus sound card worked fine when I made my setup four years ago.
On older hardware I almost never have issues, it's only really on the latest hardware that I run into all sorts of issues.
But even then I still run into issues decently often on older hardware. ex: On my T14 gen 1 (came out in 2020 so should be well supported) I was distro hopping and kept running into all sorts of things that annoyed me. The fingerprint reader was hit or miss which really surprised me. Some distros it didn't show up at all, others it technically worked, but was so inaccurate it was infuriating to use, and often times would randomly stop working. S0 standby is still really fiddly and inconsistent. It sucks ass on windows, but it was even worse with almost any distro I tried. Trackpads are also still borderline unusable on linux. I know it will never come close to Mac OS which has spoiled me, but dear god does it bring back some mid 2000s PTSD. Also battery life was much worse which surprised me for a machine of that age, I figured power management would have been perfected by now.
But that was my beater machine, I don't even bother installing it on my main machines. Mostly because of the nvidia GPUs. I have yet to try it on my old RTX 3080 laptop, but I might give it a shot since it's currently unloved. But my biggest concerns are with S0 standby (curse you Intel), and battery life. I have never gotten good battery life on bleeding edge hardware, and from all the reading I've been doing lately it looks like the battery life gap has only gotten worse on brand new hardware. I know newer ryzen battery life has been pretty rough, but it's making some good strides. The problem is that by the time the support is fully baked I'm eyeing another upgrade.
Virtual machines or servers? Hell yeah I use Linux all day long. On my computer? No thanks. I'll still to my weird windows + mac setup.
Since you've been using Linux for a while, why not buy hardware that you know are more compatible like AMD GPUs? Do you need the latest top range GPUs for your activities?
Does the job well is my priority, not runs Linux.
I'm also not going to buy inferior hardware just to run a specific OS. Plus in a laptop you don't really get a choice. Almost 0 workstations have AMD GPUs.
I've never had significant problems with that. I mean sure, there can be minor hiccups and inconveniences when finding and installing proprietary drivers, but aside from that, I don't have any issues after that.