I switched my AI workstation to Ubuntu 20 last week, and the experience was fast and great. I can now run docker containers with cuda, use PyCharm to coordinate everything and have code completion as if the code was local, even if it's executing on a docker worker node in our data center.
200% scaling on my 4K screen looks great, wifi, network, sleep, gpu all worked out of the box. And the IDE behaves exactly like on OS X.
The only thing I disliked was the default Ubuntu color scheme, but that was easy enough to change.
OSX can only guarantee that everything works because apple controls both the hardware and software.
Windows can only guarantee that everything works because they have a monopoly and therefore hardware vendors have to support windows.
Most laptops don't ship with linux/are never tested with linux, so it's never going to work flawlessly on all possible hardware configurations. It's just not possible.
It does however, 'pretty much' work on most hardware.
And if you buy a machine from a vendor that actually supports/pre-installs/tests linux, all of the hardware will work out of the box.
I recently switched from macOS to Ubuntu 19.10 and then 20.04 as my daily driver and it's way flakier and has far more random app crashes than macOS.
That said, the system is fast, the UX is way further along than I expected -- in some ways it's got a better UX than macOS. It's way, way faster at nearly everything.
my point is that if you want to do better than 'pretty much', you should buy a machine from an OEM that actually supports linux
If you're installing it on a random windows laptop, you're never going to get better than 'pretty much', because the OEM doesn't support linux or test their hardware with linux.
200% scaling on my 4K screen looks great, wifi, network, sleep, gpu all worked out of the box. And the IDE behaves exactly like on OS X.
The only thing I disliked was the default Ubuntu color scheme, but that was easy enough to change.