Linux seems like the opposite to me a slow marathon to achieve perfection. With pipewire, systemd and wayland there's less cruft than ever and you get the best out-of-the-box experience since it's inception.
Jokes aside, I'm in agreement. Audio was still slightly buggy for me using a Elgato XLR USB interface, but it consistently worked with annoying workarounds. Linux is in a very good place for even normal consumers these days, I'm hoping Valve ends up making SteamOS a generalized gaming platform that will pull more market share away from Windows in that specific niche. I'm so ready.
But like, I don't manage linux servers and stuff so I am sure it sucks in certain very specific ways for people who need to deal with it day in and out.
I remember my young days of using Slackware with init.d. That was hell.
In my professional experience, I've come to understand that the systemd project has an assload of accidental complexity that the systemd folks are unwilling to reduce. At least once a year, we'll have a production-down page from a customer whose root cause turns out to be systemd failing in some bizarre and entirely inscrutable way. After a ton of digging, we'll eventually find someone who has run into something similar, and either got no response, or a "Wow, that's weird. Well, there's nothing WE can or should do." response from the systemd people.
"Solving" these issues is very frustrating, because we usually end up changing things from one way that the docs indicated would work just fine, to a different way the docs indicate would work just fine... which doesn't give us any confidence that what we did won't suddenly stop working next year. A project that is as fundamental as systemd wants to be really should be aggressively reducing complexity to the minimum required to get the job done and regularly documenting caveats and quirks as they're discovered and deemed "E_WONTFIX".
Also, (FWIW) I've a fine time with JACK2, openrc, and xorg. I had to do some manual work to tell JACK which sound card to use and to set up the pulseaudio backfill for software that doesn't know how to speak to JACK, [0] but everything else just works.
[0] The "tricky" part was disabling all pulseaudio backend modules but the JACK backend. This was -of course- not tricky at all.
Thanks much for the link to the FAQ.
Other than that, though, Ubuntu on any old laptop (expensive thinkpads are my favorite) is my go-to daily driver. Except at work where I'm learning to deal with a (new, shiny, powerful) Macbook that I will use to... connect to a Linux VM because that's the only way to work on our software. Seriously, a whole fleet of zillion dollar macbooks so we can all ssh into beefy VMs to build/test/deploy on Linux.
IT onboarding made a point that if you want to get a Windows laptop and wipe it for Linux, you need permission and a "good reason." How about "this is stupid just let me work on stuff." Of course it's about tech support and security, which is fair enough but I feel like they have it backwards. Support Linux and then require special permission for the $4000 ssh client...
After spending a couple of days with homebrew and building some things natively on aarch64, though, I might make a hobby out of moving stuff local. It really is a beautiful machine.