I hate what Microsoft has been doing with Windows, but Linux just isn't practical for my setup yet.
The problems you describe were common in early 2000s, but haven't been common in Linux desktop for a decade or so.
For those reading above and thinking "I'll skip Linux, if that's the current status": it's not. Just pick Ubuntu LTS. Use it on common hardware (e.g not bleeding edge) and stick with the defaults. Don't try to make it exactly like your Mac or Windows machine but lean into how it does things. They are different . They may be uncomfortable. Then, once familiar feel free to tinker and hack.
I'm on Linux since 1996. I've hacked and tweaked everything in my younger years. Now I'm on a boring, hardly configured Ubuntu LTS. Well, my she'll and nvim are tuned beyond recognition, I guess. The rest: boring.
I politely disagree. I recently installed Fedora on my desktop PC because Microsoft decided that displaying a full-screen ad for Windows 11 that prevented my PC from booting was acceptable behaviour. Anyway, one of the first things I noticed on Fedora was that video playback was stuttery. After ages spent digging around, I discovered Fedora had disabled GPU hardware video decoding for legal reasons. Around the same time I made the mistake of trying to delete a directory with lots of files in it on an NTFS drive. The operation failed and corrupted the filesystem, and I had to spend a week or so downloading and restoring backups. Needless to say I'm back on Windows now.
YMMV and if you're just in the shell and in VIM all day you might not notice video glitches and performance problems (computers did text terminals in the 70s so it's not a high bar). But as a lapsed game dev I have an eye for stutter, missed frames, etc, and those were pretty constant in my configs, despite sinking probably a hundred plus hours in, time I won't get back.
We even have an internal how-to about what works and what not, for those that want to try their path outside the Thinkpad/Windows, Macbook official IT path.
Even Linux branded laptops keep having issues, example on the one I still have around, I never got around fixing it dropping wlan connections, so for large OS updates it needs to be plugged on the LAN.
Multi monitor support should generally be fine in most desktop environments, at least for 2 screens. More than that can indeed be quirky, dependent on the desktop environment and window manager (X or Wayland) you're using.
Multi-GPU is probably a bit niche to have good driver coverage, partly probably because of the Nvidia issue.
