Unless you have a thinkpad or some other popular hardware, you'll find Linux barely works at all out of the box, and even with hours of fiddling around, you'll still have to live without some features.
For example, power saving features, sleep and hibernate, screen brightness controls, fingerprint readers, keyboard hotkeys and backlights, etc. rarely work. Prepare for broken external hdmi ports or USB stuck at USB 2.0 speeds. Have fun with the fan stuck on either max or zero, or the CPU stuck at the lowest clock speed.
There are still lots of things you have to go hunting for the right old firmware version for.
I think Linux is only great if you have whatever hardware distro developers have, because that will be all that works out of the box.
I've had it work first time, perfectly on:
- Tongfangs, 3 different models
- Lenovo, many different models
- Clevos, 2 different models
- Asus Zenbooks, 2 different models
- Too many Dells to count
- Asus Zen2 desktop
The only shortcoming I've noticed is it the fingerprint readers were hit and miss, but this is mostly because the device manufacturers didn't bother with drivers.
In my world, running perfectly means, runs at least as good as windows.
Same battery life and performance. No glitches with suspend, hibernation, etc.
And I doubt that.
Not because windows is so awesome, but because hardware manufacture write and optimize their drivers for windows. And linux is a way smaller market and one with intentional no stable driver ABI (to force the vendors to open source their drivers).
That is the situation. And it sucks, because I do not like to use windows, but I need my mobile devices to be reliable.
Recent example; someone gave me a cf19 which had a dodgy battery; it had the official Panasonic windows install with the Panasonic drivers and optimiser and the battery went from full to 0% in about 15 minutes; I did a windows 10 install, again with the official drivers and got about 15 minutes. Did a windows 10 install without drivers and got about 15 minutes. Did Ubuntu install with my post install script and get consistently 3.5 hours. Yes, I know this is a weird case; I bought a new battery by now and still get the same behaviour; no clue what’s up. I thought it was funny though because ‘windows better battery life’ people.
And this always happens; my x220 runs 8+ hours under Linux while barely getting to 4 under windows for the same work. GPD pocket 1 runs over 10 while under windows getting not even 4. And these are the ones I use all the time for work. I consistently see this and have no clue what people are doing who claim windows has better battery life; must be much different workloads. I use i3wm (which I believe makes all the difference; with Unity, battery life gets slashed by up to 80%), code in vscode and vim and browse in Firefox; but I do that under windows as well.
But a proper installed windows, without bloatware and updated drivers, always won by a large margin.
And the bigger showstopper are standby/hibernation. Touchscreen glitches etc.
So I have 2 devices, one lightweight chromebook. A bigger windows laptop and manjaro on the desktop.
I very much prefered to have manjaro only.
Out of the box linux experience is actually quite good. Performance loss I can handle, but standby-resume reliably introduced touch screen bugs and other annoyances. Or did not wake up at all. I actually just recently gave up with linux on it and installed windows.
(which was surprisingly a big huzzle, I had to resort to third party software to get the right windows drivers. But now it runs way better - and more importantly, more stable.)