As someone who has moved back and forth between Mac and Linux around 3 or 4 times since 1992, Linux is actually surprisingly reasonable. For laptops, I just buy from Dell, with Ubuntu preloaded, and everything works. (Dell's build quality isn't as good as Apple's, so I usually spend extra for Dell's next-day on-site service.) For workstations, it's usually pretty straightforward to get something that Just Works.

After that, I've got Chrome, Visual Studio Code, Steam and a full suite of command-line tools, which covers my personal essentials. But if you rely heavily on something like Photoshop or the MacOS X Omnifocus application, then you might find much larger holes on the Linux side.

As a matter of principal, I consider myself too old to troubleshoot Linux without getting paid for it. It turns out that I virtually never do that, so I'm pretty happy. Really, buying pre-loaded and fully supported Linux laptops eliminates 80% of the pain, and nearly all of the remaining 20% can be avoided by refusing to get clever.

I was in almost the exact same boat as the author. As a long-time Apple power user, I reached my breaking point about a year ago and finally migrated my workflow to Linux. I’m still letting my iPhone age out, but I’ve already stripped it of all Apple cloud services. Instead, I’ve replaced every stock app with self-hosted alternatives running on my own beefy NAS. If you have the technical overhead to manage your own stack, I highly recommend it, owning your data is a total game-changer for privacy.