I see this argument in every thread about Linux. There's always this one magical user where everything "just works", has had 0 issues and everything's just dandy.
The funny thing is, it's not the year of the Linux desktop, but it's increasingly not the year of the Windows desktop anymore either. "Linux is shit, and Windows just works" is becoming less true as we go; so Linux being bad stops being as convincing an argument when Windows is frustrating in different ways.
I’m not going to lie and say Linux is problem free, but “barely works” is a massive exaggeration. Linux works just fine. Windows isn’t problem free. I use windows for work and it’s often a roll of the dice whether my monitors will got to sleep properly, or if windows will deign to recognize my keyboard on boot.
Linux is not a 0 issue OS, but I use roughly the same methods and reasoning to get it to workable state as I might on Windows 10 and I wouldn't say it even takes much longer. Linux is surely cheaper. The difference is, Linux can keep growing in the direction you want and choose.
What are some specific issues? Most of the stuff I hear is either hardware related or some software someone used on Windows doesn't exist on Linux. For hardware issues it depends on the hardware you're using. Since most drivers aren't open source, full Linux support often comes a while after it's released. I don't use the most recent hardware and haven't had a problem where something doesn't "just work" in years. I don't even remember the last time. Not being able to use cutting edge hardware is a price I'm willing to pay because it actually saves you money. This is also why there is a big push for open hardware.
- Hardware support - if you don't have any special needs, it tends to work well, but as soon as you go into exotic stuff like digitizers or DP daisy chaining, GPU switching, or you are just plain unlucky, expect a world of hurt
- UI Papercuts: There's a ton of these - like extracting files in GUI is by far the least intuitive under GNOME compared to other OS's, no thumbnails, pdf reader can't be set to exactly how I like it, and made to remember it, etc. - every DE has its own niggles. The fact that every DE has its own set of apps - if using GNOME it comes with its own pdf reader, god forbid you use a third-party one, creates a strange culty feeling among app devs. Also, closed source, monetized apps are reviled, even if they solve a problem better than anything open source.
- Development experience: Ironically terrible. Binary compatibility is nonexistent, compiling stuff generally involves apt-geting (or equivalent) packages and hoping you have the right versions in the repos. Some of the stuff in the repos doesn't even work (insta-crashes), due to being built wrong.
4k + 1080 monitor on nvidia gpu is very difficult to use (wayland doesn’t support nvidia until very recently, I’m not even sure if it is merged yet). X doesn’t support per monitor dpi, and fractional scaling per monitor is buggy on most distros.
Ubuntu keeps forgetting the sound devices output I set, and I have to config it every single time the machine comes back from sleep (I’m using sound via hdmi on my monitor, I’m guessing it has something to do with the monitor sleeping in different way).
And the usual, sleep/ suspend doesn’t work. There are 50% chance of my 4k monitor doesn’t come back up after sleeping, and I have to unplug and replug it in for it to work.
Last time I tried updating Ubuntu on my parents' PC, it completely fell over because it tried to throw up a dialog on a console in the middle of the update, even though I was doing a GUI update. When I killed that (uninteractible, permanently froze the update) process, the system autorebooted in a desktopless state. Now, I knew to use `dpkg --reconfigure` from a root shell to fix this, but a layman would have been stumped and had to reinstall. 2021 at least was not the year of the Linux desktop in our household.
(Let alone the dozen of small KDE issues we've had over the years. It's really easy to get that desktop in an uninteractible state if you click the wrong things.)
Cognitive overload. Thousands of distros with tens of desktop environments using different toolkits. Each desktop environment has its own suite of software. So instead of having a solid set of great working apps there are tons of poorly made apps.
If you need to use Visual Studio, Photoshop, Lightroom, 3d max, Autocad, Premiere Pro, Ableton Live, Mathcad etc., you are out of luck.
I wouldn't say I've had zero issues or that everything just works, but things tend to fail less often or in less inscrutable ways than Windows or MacOS.
Most newer fingerprint reader models work well on Linux. I have a Mac and a Windows laptop for the few times something doesn't work on Linux. which is vanishingly rare these days.