Does “everything works” mean that for you, close to zero effort will be required over the next 6/12/18/24/36 months?

Because my problem isn’t finding a way to be happy with a Linux setup at a point in time but finding a way not to have to do a bunch of work every so often just to keep stuff working.

And 48/72/120 months (I've only just replaced my Dell Inspiron that has been happily running Linux since 2010). Security updates are pretty slick now, I don't expect them to break anything. Upgrading to the next Mint major version can be a touch tricky sometimes, but same with MacOS.

Once something works (and only WiFi didn't work out the box), it keeps working.

I dug into the hash key thing - of course the US Mac has a 'hash key' as SHIFT+3. However the UK Mac (from 2015 anyway) replaces it with the £, requiring SHIFT+ALT+3 (or something like that) for #. This was mind mindbogglingly annoying for software dev.