I would be really interested what you were unhappy with? the only major thing that truely changed after 2017 was that wine became almost universally compatible.
It was freakish how little issues i had in 2019 when i switched completely.
Ubuntu distupgrade breaks my machine so badly I need to spend days putting it together again
Switched to Arch
Upgrade. Bluetooth breaks. MFC device breaks. One of the two almost always.
Compared to this the only thing I dislike with Windows upgrades is how it can wake up the machine even from S0 state (wtf!) to upgrade and reboot. But aside from that, it's a complete nonevent when it upgrades. It's been near six years and I never had an issue.
I had a client using an F5 VPN requiring MFA and there was no MFA support except on Windows. I got it working with an old Firefox running as root (because that supported old style extensions and I managed to find an old extension that worked). The only question regarding this setup was from the head of IT at this company asking but not receiving any responses on how to do this.
Weird enterprise wifi always a headache.
I just got a GPD G1. Here's my experience getting it to work:
1. Plug in power.
2. Plug in the Thunderbolt cable
3. Install AMD Adrenaline driver only (only step that requires a tiny bit of expertise -- don't install all the stuff)
4. Reboot
5. It works.
6. If I unplug it, machine goes back to the nVidia GPU inside the laptop. No fuss.
Tell me true, is this going to work on Linux ? I seriously doubt.
2017 was in the early phase of pretty disruptive era with Linux - eg systemd, audio, wayland, app sandboxes etc etc. I get the feeling things are settling now, and stabilising / consolidating into a better place overall with less churn. But for a while things weren't as stable as they typically were before that.
I tried wayland maybe a little over a year ago and the copy and paste behavior was bad enough to switch back. I recently switched to get freesync to work on multimonitor and the issue is now manageable.
app sandboxes I fell less positive about - I dislike them since I think they are only fixing stuff that is already unaceptable to happen.
As for audio - yes while pulseaudio was working i remember some issues with that (mostly related to s/pdiv). This also has lessened with pipewire.
It was freakish how little issues i had in 2019 when i switched completely.