> The state of development of the various GNU/ Linux distributions has reached a point where everything "just works".
Not really. I'd argue it has actually gotten worse in recent years, unless you enjoy using ancient hardware.
Support for 802.11ac chipsets in particular has been bad in my experience: Intel only works properly with very recent kernels, Broadcom and Qualcomm/Atheros tend to be buggy or they don't work at all. Or they're just barely working and essential features like, oh, using the 5 GHz band, are missing. And these are the three vendors whose chipsets you'll find most commonly in Laptops at the moment.
I guess it's possible I was just very unlucky.
OP also mentions Bluetooth, which I would agree is a bad joke on Linux. The whole stack seems to be garbage.
And of course, if you have a Laptop with anything other than Intel graphics, you might as well not even bother.
All of this – except maybe the Bluetooth part – is of course mostly a problem of hardware vendors being indifferent or even hostile towards Linux, but that does not change the fact that very often it does not "just work". You need to pick your hardware very carefully.
Not really. I'd argue it has actually gotten worse in recent years, unless you enjoy using ancient hardware.
Support for 802.11ac chipsets in particular has been bad in my experience: Intel only works properly with very recent kernels, Broadcom and Qualcomm/Atheros tend to be buggy or they don't work at all. Or they're just barely working and essential features like, oh, using the 5 GHz band, are missing. And these are the three vendors whose chipsets you'll find most commonly in Laptops at the moment.
I guess it's possible I was just very unlucky.
OP also mentions Bluetooth, which I would agree is a bad joke on Linux. The whole stack seems to be garbage.
And of course, if you have a Laptop with anything other than Intel graphics, you might as well not even bother.
All of this – except maybe the Bluetooth part – is of course mostly a problem of hardware vendors being indifferent or even hostile towards Linux, but that does not change the fact that very often it does not "just work". You need to pick your hardware very carefully.