> Laptops are especially problematic, with issues like Wi-Fi, sleep, and battery life.
100% true, but I love Linux as a daily driver for development. It is the same os+architecture as the servers I am deploying to! I have had to carefully select hardware to ensure things like WiFi work and that the screen resolution does not require fractional scaling. Mac is definitely superior hardware but I enjoy being able to perf test the app on its native OS and skip things like running VMs for docker.
Same! That's One less OS that I have to remember how it works!
I'm not sure I understand the whole tinkering thing. Whenever I tinker with my Linux, it's because I decided to try something tinkery, and usually mostly because I wanted to tinker.
Like trying out that fancy new tiling Wayland WM I heard about last week...
I feel like the main times Linux requires tinkering are:
1. You're trying to run it on hardware that isn't well-supported. This is a bummer, but you can't just expect any random machine (especially a laptop) to run Linux well. If you're buying a new computer and expect to run Linux on it, do your research beforehand and make sure all the hardware in it is supported.
2. You've picked a distro that isn't boring. I run Debian testing, and then Debian stable for the first six months or so after testing is promoted to stable. (Testing is pretty stable on its own, but then once the current testing release turns into the current stable release, testing gets flooded with lots of package updates that might not be so stable, so I wait.) For people who want something even more boring, they can stick with Debian stable. If you really need a brand-new version of something that stable doesn't have, it might be in backports, or available as a Snap or Flatpak (I'm not a fan of either of these, but they're options).
3. You use a desktop environment that isn't boring. I'm super super biased here[0], but Xfce is boring and doesn't change all that much. I've been using it for more than 20 years and it still looks and behaves very similarly today as it did when I first started using it.
If you use well-supported hardware, and run a distro and desktop environment that's boring, you will generally have very few issues with Linux and rarely (if ever) have to tinker with it.
[0] Full disclosure: I maintain a couple Xfce core components.
Two kinds of linux tinkering often get aliased and cause confusion in conversations.
The first kind is the enthusiast changing their init system bootloader and package manager and "neofetch/fastfetch" and WM and... every few weeks.
The second kind is the guy who uses xfce with a hidpi display who has to google and try various combinations of xrandr(augmented with xfwm zoom feature), GDK_SCALE, QT_SCALE_FACTOR, theme that supports hidpi in the titlebar, few icons in the status tray not scaling up(wpa_gui), do all that and find out that apps that draw directly with OpenGL don't respect these settings, dealing with multiple monitors, plugging in hdmi and then unplugging messing up the audio profile and randomly muting chromium browsers, deciding whether to use xf86-* Or modesetting or whatever the fix is to get rid of screen tearing. Bluetooth/wifi. On my laptop for example I had to disable usb autosuspend lest the right hand side USB-A port stop working.
If our threshold for qualifying well-supported hardware is "not even a little tinkering required" then we are left with vanishingly few laptops. For the vast vast majority of laptops, atleast the things I mentioned above are required. All in all, it amounted to couple of kernel parameters, a pipewire config file to stop random static noise in the bluetooth sink and then a few xfce setting menu tweaks (WM window scaling and display scaling). So not that dramatic, but it is still annoying to deal with.
The 2nd kind of tinkering is annoying, and is required regardless of distro/de/wm choice since it's a function of the layers below the de/wm, mostly the kernel itself.
I think that for your example of having problems with HiDPI you might have had in mind another desktop environment than XFCE.
I have been using XFCE for more than 10 years almost exclusively with multiple HiDPI monitors.
After Linux installation I never had to do anything else except of going to XFCE/Settings/Appearance and set a suitably high value for "Custom DPI Setting".
Besides that essential setting (which scales the fonts of all applications, except for a few Java programs written by morons), it may be desirable to set a more appropriate value in "Desktop/Icons/Icon size". Also in "Panel preferences" you may want to change the size of the taskbar and the size of its icons.
You may have to also choose a suitable desktop theme, but that is a thing that you may want to do after any installation, regardless of having HiDPI monitors.
100% true, but I love Linux as a daily driver for development. It is the same os+architecture as the servers I am deploying to! I have had to carefully select hardware to ensure things like WiFi work and that the screen resolution does not require fractional scaling. Mac is definitely superior hardware but I enjoy being able to perf test the app on its native OS and skip things like running VMs for docker.