I switched to linux for my laptop this year and encountered surprisingly few problems. The distribution defaulted the KDE plasma and I certainly don't feel punished for leaving the command line.

[edit]

The only issue so far is that when I unplug an external display, it sometimes fails to shrink my desktop accordingly. I've seen issues of a similar level of annoyance on macs as well.

[edit2]

There are the other standard linux things (every piece of software is configured differently &c.) but as we are talking about someone who uses linux on the server already, I didn't consider that apropos.