Suppose you need a new computer for work. Your other options are Windows or a Linux desktop experience, both of which are vastly worse in other ways. (No, I don't want to dork around with spending days compiling kernel patches and installing soundcard drivers before I can use the computer.)
I'd gladly buy any other laptop that was simple and just worked out of the box in the sense that a Mac does. But there aren't any.
> No, I don't want to dork around with spending days compiling kernel patches and installing soundcard drivers before I can use the computer.
You are badly misrepresenting the current state of mainstream Linux distributions. I've done probably 20 Linux installs, and by and large it always just works. If there is some necessary proprietary driver, it's almost always as simple as Menu --> Administration --> Driver Manager and then clicking once or twice.
Kernel patches? I wouldn't know how the hell to do that, but somehow I've been using Linux happily for a decade.
I am using Linux distros on both laptops and a desktop as the only OS and you are definitely misrepresenting the current state of things. It takes a lot of work.
For the laptops, the clickpads never work well. You have to mess with synaptics settings a lot and eventually you get a slightly worse config than the default on Windows and a lot worse than OSX clickpad. This is coming from someone who looked into hardware compatibility and bought a laptop that didn't seem to have any problems.
For Desktops (and laptops * 10), you have a lot of issues if you want to
A) Use CUDA in general for neural networks.
B) Resize VM encrypted hard drive after creation.
C) Dual boot with Windows (things like updating windows or reinstalling a Linux distro after digging yourself into a hole with CUDA drivers mentioned above can wipe grub in a way that wouldn't let you boot).
D) Allow hibernation in a dual monitor setup with proprietary drivers.
E) Use a tablet for drawing on a system with multi-monitor setup and proprietary drivers.
F) Mess with Compiz settings too much when you have proprietary drivers.
G) Dual booting with one hard drive with Linux full disk encryption and non-default partitions and another hard drive regular Windows.
H) Dual boot from one disk and encrypt Linux partition with luks and forgo swap partition.
Having said all this:
I would still use ubuntu/linux because almost all non-.NET/Java tools are easier to use on Linux. Lets you customize your system and code without VM overhead and inconveniences.
The system doesn't get slower over time and nothing unexpected randomly happens (except after updates to graphics drivers).
Most of your list is either a specialized requirement, or something that probably wouldn't be that much easier on Windows / MacOS. I meant that simple things like browsing the Internet, video chatting, and playing music (the needs of 99% of computer users) work out of the box. GP was saying that you literally can't install Linux without kernel patching and command line wizardry, which is totally false, and the only point I was refuting.
I'll add one to your list -- dealing with Linux audio. I have a stable music production setup now, but it took me a long time to iron everthing out.
I recently had to binary patch a video card driver -- using a patch I found on a forum -- just to get it to start X, after I had specifically bought the hardware (Foxconn, AMD - major brands) because they specifically advertised that they fully support Linux and X, which I had cross-verified with the Linux and X documentation.
Why? The video card was a Radeon model "1234" (I forget the real exact number), but the hardware was a newer minor revision that identified itself as a "1234-A" to the OS in its ID string. Linux (Ubuntu) then simply refused to load the "1234" driver, because "1234-A" was not in the list of approved card ID strings in the driver.
Absolutely nothing on AMD's site, nothing on Foxconn's site, nothing on Ubuntu's sites. Contact tech support? Ha.
Eventually -- after days of googling for a solution -- I found some obscure forum where others were discussing the exact same problem. Someone provided a binary patch ("just load up the video driver in a hex editor and change the following 20 bytes to these other opaque values".) It worked.
I'm not sure when you last used Linux, but nobody compiles their own custom kernel with patches anymore.
You don't have to make up stuff to make a point; yes, Linux is probably not as polished as MacOS (though I doubt that), but it's much more user friendly now than you make it out to be.
I use Linux on a daily basis, including recently building a Linux desktop machine from scratch. Its usability is much better than it was in 1999, yes, but it's still a very far cry from the polished, just-works user experience of the Mac.
No, I should not have to edit any text files to get the GUI to come up.
I've been using Linux as my primary OS since 2009. Not once I had to compiled anything at all. It works surprisingly well with almost any hardware you throw at it.
It's not just hardware support (though even that still requires stuff like editing text files before the GUI will start on certain common machines.) The UX of the GUIs leaves much to be desired - certainly relative to an Apple machine. Linux GUIs were all designed by committee and coded by volunteers, and it shows.
I'd gladly buy any other laptop that was simple and just worked out of the box in the sense that a Mac does. But there aren't any.