Ohh come on. I am not against linux but to say it works flawlessly is ridiculous. My last try with it a few years was the most ridiculous. If i plugged my bamboo stylus, the screen would just go all crazy, as soon as i unplugged it, back to normal. Stylus worked on windows and mac, but on linux (ubuntu lts) i couldn’t even plug it in (and took me a while to find out that was the problem as it installed everything fine, then after the reboot this happened, only when i decided to disconnect everything but the monitor and try plugging one by one did i find this out
And lets not even go over the ux disaster that is the mix and match of uis from various apps.
Here comes your problem (which I actually mentioned in my above post). Choose hardware designed for Linux if you want it to really work. Why don't you complain that your Windows installation does not work well on a Macbook?
If I plug a non supported device on my macbook, the screen doesn't go all scrambly.
And even so, how can you say it works 99% of the time if you have to go and research each piece of peripheral that you want to use? Normal users go to bestbuy or amazon or whatnot and buy a microphone, they don't want to go and see if it works on ubuntu or whatnot or have weird behaviours at home. you can blame manufacturs for not supporting linux while they support win/mac, but again, normal users experience just isn't that great.
You said you are running linux for you and your relatives. Who installed it on your relatives machines? Who checked the compatibility of each hardware and maybe even bought some replacement things to work on linux? I know most users/relative I know wouldn't go to websites to try to find out if this or that works well with this and that. They just want to go to a shop, buy a laptop+accessories and plug them in when they get home
Yes, the actual problem is the lack of preinstalled Linux on retail products. You can find that in online shops though. My laptop came with Linux preinstalled and I can’t recommend it enough.
And lets not even go over the ux disaster that is the mix and match of uis from various apps.