Linux is so close to convincing me to move (especially once I moved to Pop_os!, but there are a few things that it is simply bad at. This is especially true for laptops.

My laptop is always hot enough to burn my balls off. This is after disabling my dedicated GPU, disabling turbo boost and underclocking the cpu.

Consequently the battery life is abysmal as well.

Lastly, trackpads seem to worse on linux across the board.

Those things are major sticking points in almost all linux laptops.

I have been able to find near-perfect replacements for everything else. (apart from some MS office and enterprise software, but can't blame linux for that)

Run “sudo powertop” and probably “man synaptics” (depends on the hardware) to find out how to fix power consumption and the trackpad, respectively.

In particular, in Ubuntu 18.04 (and maybe all of gnome) they removed mouse / trackpad acceleration, so using pointing devices feels like drinking a pot of coffee and working with you hand immersed in thick mud. There’s a config file option / cli to fix that somewhere. Same with the non-existent palm rejection.

And this right here is the problem.

I want a system that JUST WORKS. I don't have enough time in my day, with all of my other responsibilities, to figure out why something is slightly broken.

Corporate VPN's are the other one.

That's why I really don't mind running MacOS at work - it works well, and the defaults are sane.

An application consuming too much power for your tastes is something that could (and does) happen on any OS.

Power consumption is not a matter of taste, no one wants their applications to consume more power than necessary.

Laptops contain a lot of proprietary tech, not all is well supported. It's not all bad though: Chromebooks run some version of modified Linux just fine (and the trackpad of the original Pixel works great). My Dell M6800 (Ubuntu 'certified') is well supported and runs cool. It's an age-old, but often ignored advise to first consider one's needs and then chose fitting soft- and hardware. Instead people just go out and buy cheap or shiny and then wonder what to do with it ;-}

FWIW my nvidia laptop also became a heater running Ubuntu (which Pop!_OS is based on) but has been running like a cool dream since I installed Manjaro (Xfce, out-of-the-box non-free driver setup).