Hardware incompatibilities goes both way stuff that won't work on windows or that requires some obscure/bloated driver will work plug and play on linux.
Depends on the hardware and the work put on it but the opensource people.
Many people have their first linux experience with ubuntu which is a shame seeing how this distribution is riddled with problems that are not being addressed because the distro is going to be binned in 6 months anyway and devs have to work on the next release.
I agree with you, daily usage is mostly a web browser / email client but there's also all the uncommon stuff and exotic hardware except my experience is that 70-80% of time you plug it and it just works, 10% of time it requires some web searching and meddling with installing/configuring somethins and 10% of time it will not work (85% of those are apple devices).
There's also one important thing to take into account, in 2010 Mac were repairable and serviceable, since 2012 repairability of Mac is abysmal and consistently get the worst score on fixit. The long list of Apple engineering failures[1] adds to the idea that getting Mac just to be able to run OSX is not as good as it was in 2010.
I have had occasional issues with Ubuntu, but differences between distros feel minor in comparison to the problems that initially coloured my perception.
My first experience with Linux was in the university computer lab. I just needed to quickly send an email. I logged in, and I couldn't figure out how to do anything. Not even log out. After asking a random other student for help, a group of people came to my aid. Turns out the desktop environment was actually broken, because the IT staff had configured it wrong. One of the other students figured out how to open a shell without using any menus and he logged me out. I decided not to use those computers again.
My second experience with Linux was on a remote terminal at my job. It was awful. Nothing worked correctly. I now realize that whoever had set up my account had done a bad copy/paste/edit job from somebody else's dotfiles, but at the time I just assumed that's how Linux was. I figured the misconfigured tcsh shell with broken autocomplete
that they gave me was normal, because I had never seen anything different before. The oddly configured, licenseless RHEL desktop they gave me reinforced the idea that everything is hard on Linux.
I had an incredibly negative opinion of Linux at this point. Every interaction had shown me that Linux was a confusing mess of garbage. Then I installed Ubuntu on my desktop. It was easy and everything worked million times better. Later, I tried Fedora and CentOS and the same was true there. At that point, I realized that Linux wasn't broken and hard to use by default. It was IT staff that was ruining it.
Many people have their first linux experience with ubuntu which is a shame seeing how this distribution is riddled with problems that are not being addressed because the distro is going to be binned in 6 months anyway and devs have to work on the next release.
I agree with you, daily usage is mostly a web browser / email client but there's also all the uncommon stuff and exotic hardware except my experience is that 70-80% of time you plug it and it just works, 10% of time it requires some web searching and meddling with installing/configuring somethins and 10% of time it will not work (85% of those are apple devices).
There's also one important thing to take into account, in 2010 Mac were repairable and serviceable, since 2012 repairability of Mac is abysmal and consistently get the worst score on fixit. The long list of Apple engineering failures[1] adds to the idea that getting Mac just to be able to run OSX is not as good as it was in 2010.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8