I recently put Linux on a MacBook Air. It’s the same as it’s ever been - extremely finicky and time consuming to get all your stuff working smoothly. Requires scouring random bug reports, stack overflow etc to find all the little work arounds.

This is for what I consider critical stuff: network drivers, suspend/sleep, power management, display brightness etc.

My impression is that it is not any more or less of a mess than it was in the 2000s, or even in the late 90s.

All that being said, it’s still wonderful and gratifying once you have everything tuned to your liking.