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I tried to use Linux back in 2005. After spending five hours trying to get Wi-Fi to work I vowed id never recommend it to anyone.
Yeah but that's 19 years ago
It's still not great. Especially on bleeding edge hardware.
Usually it works fine on older hardware as long as what you don't have requires proprietary software. If it does then lord have mercy.
In many cases that's true, although we probably can't do anything about it when companies refuse to support Linux ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I have a fairly "bleeding edge" laptop with an RTX3000 series GPU and an AMD CPU/APU and I have been surprised at how well it runs on Linux.
Not only is my battery life consistently better but it handles the GPU switching flawlessly and performance in games is also consistently noticeably better than what I experienced running Windows on the same hardware.
Even in just the last year or two the advancements in Linux support have been downright incredible! (At least in my personal experience)
Of course I'm using Nvidia's proprietary drivers, but I was in Windows too and my experience has only improved by switching to Linux.
I tried installing it on my 3 years old (at the time) Surface Book and while some things worked they certainly didn't work as well as in Windows. I messed around with a specially crafted Linux kernel for the Surface devices and that was a bit better but the wifi routinely stopped working after resuming from sleep. The touchscreen worked but not with the pen. The device also consumed huge amounts of battery life when sleeping. Would not recommend.
That was in 2005. Now you can try on a live ISO if everything works before installing, and the driver support expanded massively.
I remember in 2008 when I was in university trying to use Linux on my laptop. I had to run a script at the command line to connect to my uni's wifi, because the UI always failed to connect. Then I had to keep wpa_supplicant running in a terminal window the entire time.
Month ago I had to use an official python script to connect to my high school's wifi. It was a simple dialog gui though.