I work in a quantitative science in academia, and this is a major reason stopping me from making the switch. It can be incredibly time consuming to solve problems. In my college days I spent days trying to get my keyboard backlight to work and my trackpad to work properly. I have a bunch of research work that needs to get done yesterday and I simply don't have time to troll forums or hang out in IRC for someone who might help me. Throw in some daily driver software that I am comfortable using does not run on Linux and I am still stuck on a Mac many years later.

The old adage is that Linux is free only if you don't value your time.

When I was younger, I enjoyed debugging all the weird issues on Linux. Now I value my free time way too much.

I'd rather pay a premium for a device that Just Works. I can have a separate hobby machine I can fuck around with and compile drivers and stuff, but the machine I do my work on? It needs to work and work well. Every minute I spend debugging some driver or fighting the trackpad is a minute I'm not earning money.

There's also the cost of getting out of the Apple ecosystem to factor in.

As we've seen with recent mac issues, they seem these days to Only Just Work.

Some flavours of Linux just work these days, see other comments. There really is no need to tinker these days, but if you want to tinker, you can!

But a hugely underestimated cost is the cost of moving away from Apple. Watch, phone, tablet, music, accounts etc makes it an ecosystem. It's not a simple computer, Apple is a brand that integrates with lives.

Of course just how much of the population don't care about privacy so long as they can use a nice UX, many people will not care about Free Software so long as they have a good experience. Linux on the desktop is not going to win UX wars, just like how duck duck go will not win the search wars.

People don't use Linux because it has a better experience than Apple! There are other reasons.

In the future when users can only rent Mac's and not own them, people will still be saying the same thing: I don't care that I don't own this thing, I just want it to work, and it feels better than this other thing.

Linux always works out of the box on my Librem 15, which was designed to run Linux from the beginning.

And you can run Qubes on it, which is a big plus.

That’s exactly why, after 17 years as an Apple user, I settled on a System76 Lemur Pro, rather than a Lenovo or Dell . The OS integration (Pop-OS) is excellent, and the hardware explicitly supported.

I just posted the same thing. System 76 Lemurs are amazing linux laptops.

Both Lenovo and Dell offer laptops with Linux preinstalled and therefore guarantee that the hardware is fully supported

> My desktop gets confused about audio inputs when plugging things (e.g. mic) in and out

If it's any consolation my Mac Pro on Catalina insists on switching to my monitors as audio outputs upon any restart or display wake.

It works out of the box if you use it on supported hardware (just like macOS). Buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled.

Switch from Debian to Fedora. This fixed most of my Thinkpad issues.