People whose main environment is Linux intentionally buy hardware that works flawlessly with Linux.
People who try Linux occasionally do it on whatever hardware they have, which still almost always works with Linux, but there are occasional issues with sketchy Windows-only hardware or insufficiently tested firmware or flaky wifi cards, and that is enough for there to be valid anecdotes in any given comments section with several people saying they tried it and it isn't perfect. Because "perfect" is a very high bar.
There is also the quiet part to this. People who religiously use Linux and think that it is the best OS that can ever be, don't realize how many little optimizations go into a consumer OS. They use outdated hardware. They use the lower end models of the peripherals (people still recommend 96 DPI screens just for this). They use limited capabilities of that hardware. They don't rely on deeply interactive user interfaces.
The older machines I've owned since around 2014 and I remember the hardware support was fairly competent but far from perfect and graphics and multimidia performance was mediocre at best and ZERO support for accelerated video encode/decoder. Fast forward to around the last year or two and linux on both of these machines is screaming fast (within those machines capabilities...), graphics and multimidia is as good as you could get on windows (thanks wayland and pipewire!) and acc. video decode/encode works great (still have to do the rigmarole in fedora, but it's ootb in manjaro).
Both the 2014 machine and the 2025 sport a 4k display @120hz (no frame drops!) with no issues using 200% scaling for hi-dpi usage. Pretty much all of the apps are hi-dpi aware, with the exception of a few running on WINE which until a few months wasn't HI-DPI aware. (this feature is experimental and among many other improvements in WINE may take another year to mature and be 100% stable)
I got a Thinkpad to just run this setup under Linux 2020. AMD didn't solve the problem in their driver until 2022 when I was able to drive all of them at 60 Hz.
Fractional scaling has been a problem across all platforms, but I agree Linux has taken its time to get it right and still have some gotchas. You should try to avoid it in any platform honestly, you can get sometimes get blurry apps even in Windows. AFAIK KDE is the first to get it right in this complex situations where you mix multiple monitors with different fractional scaling ratios and have legacy apps to boot. GNOME has had experimental fractional scaling for a while but it's still hidden behind a flag.
It also helps to not have nVidia trash on your old (and sometimes even new) computers if you want longevity. My old machines have intel and AMD graphics with full support from current kernel and mesa.
Hm, recently I bought a random "gamer PC" for the beefier GPU (mainly to experiment with local LLMs), installed Linux on it, and everything just worked out of the box. I remember having tons of problems back in 2009 when I first tried Ubuntu, though. I have dual boot, just today I ran a few benchmarks with Qwen3. On Windows, token generation is 15% slower. Whenever I have to boot into Windows (mainly to let the kid play Roblox), everything feels about 30% slower and clunkier.
At work, we use Linux too - Dell laptops. The main irritating problem has been that on Linux, Dell's Dock Stations are often buggy with dual monitors (when switching, the screen will just freeze). The rest works flawlessly for me. It wasn't that long ago when my Windows (before I migrated to Linux) had BSODs every other day...
Anecdotes are like that.
> solved a while ago
Can not be the case because I was facing these issues less than a couple of years ago.
I was responding to the "Stockholm syndrome" comment specifically because there are a number of hardware and software problems (e.g. https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/gnome-has-no-thumbna...) with using linux as a desktop operating system that linux users have to find their way around, so I found the comment rather full of irony.
PS: I already know that the file-picker issue has been fixed. That does not take away from the fact that it was in fact broken for decades. It is only meant as an example.
Just like with Mac and Windows, you choose the supported hardware, and everything is flawless.
And it's not clear what the Linux ones are. Like, our dept ordered officially Linux-supported Thinkpads for whoever wanted them, and turns out they still have unsolved Bluetooth audio problems. Those people use wired headphones now.
Just like Mac, though, the key is to buy from a vendor that ships hardware designed for Linux, with Linux preinstalled, and with support for Linux.
Unlike, Mac, though, Linux won't block you from installing it on Windows hardware, so it's not as obvious that you're on your own.