Linux requires _literally_ no fiddling on recent Thinkpads.

The whole "having to tweak Linux" is a tired old meme.

Maybe if you’re OK with the defaults on whatever DE the distro ships with. Once you start trying to bend the stock DE to your will or install some other DE/WM setup, you’re likely going to be faced with an endless rabbit hole of tweaking and configuration to get the result you’re seeking. Your only hope for escaping this is finding a DE with defaults you like or forcing yourself to adjust to whatever bits of incongruence that exist between whichever DE and your personal preferences.

This is the problem I’ve faced with Linux at least. I’ve been able to achieve something close-ish to what I want in a Linux desktop setup, but no matter what there’s always a list of papercuts that I can’t really do much about short of writing my own DE (good luck with that with the insanity of X and the bad docs of wayland/libweston/etc).

You are comparing apples with oranges. If you tried to modify the behaviour of the desktop of other OS'es to the extent as you want with Linux, then that would be a fair comparison.

If you want it to look and behaviour just like Windows 7 or Mac OS iDon'tCare, then you might be lucky and find a premade theme that does that work for you.

Same can be said for OSX or Windows, if it is even possible to use a different DE/WM than the default one.

My first Linux distribution was Slackware 2.0, I used a myriad since then, subscribed to Linux Journal during its first decade, eventually as UI/UX developer I re-focused on Windows as main OS, although I still run Ubuntu on my travel netbook.

So I do know my way around Linux distributions.

Tweaking Linux is something I still have to do occasionally, like hacking around video acceleration, handling OpenGL rendering problems, or connecting to wlan routers.

So HiDPI on multiple monitors works every time, in the overwhelming majority of apps too?

(This is usually the scenario where people say "Yes! all you have to do is swap ___ with ___ and tweak this one setting, and it's done!"

But what if you don't have a recent Thinkpad? It was still kind of a pain to get Ubuntu on my 11" Yoga laptop. Hi DPI settings and display scaling never worked quite right and neither did the touch screen.

I’m all in on Linux, and I love my Lenovo X1, but this is not entirely true.

It took me all of two hours to get suspend, the only missing feature out of the box, working for me.

Whereas no amount of effort can decrapify the adware in Windows.

Sure it can. Just buy your PC from Microsoft directly. No crapware, or so I’ve heard.