The Broadcom wireless card my XPS 13 (9343) Developer Edition shipped with absolutely does not play well with Linux. Including the Ubuntu 14.04 version it shipped with.
It's a known issue, and that's not all. When the machine originally launched there were huge problems with the audio, the trackpad, the bluetooth, and the screen brightness control.
You don't have to buy it. I did... for $1100, and now it mostly sits on a shelf. I had to go back to my MacBook Air to get multi-modal work done. I can use Linux as a primary machine if the only thing I ever use is Emacs. The instant I have to venture across different applications and different modes of content creation (docs, code, slide decks, etc.) it's a very bespoke and inefficient experience.
The Broadcom fix is literally one apt-get install command. The driver issues keep happening because companies are loathe at releasing drivers for Linux or even provide support and assistance for third party drivers. Here's looking at you Realtek.
Also I don't understand how something can be bespoke and inefficient at the same time. With MacOS, you learn the Apple way, with Linux you have the freedom to create your own workflow. This freedom is what stops Linux from being a noon friendly OS, and frankly, I am happy about that.
Also. I definitely do not have "the freedom to create my own workflow". No amount of my trying, including digging into window manager, UI toolkits, and application code for KDE, GNOME, or Xfce resulted in my being able to provide consistent keyboard shortcuts across the board. So I wasn't able to get to a point where I could use 30-years of muscle memory and predictability in and across the UX to facilitate my work.
I'm not a noo[n]. I'm a distributed systems engineer and functional programmer.
This "Linux is open source, so it can do anything!" trope is really annoying.
I did not intend to call you a noo[n] (and neither to misspell it that way. Typing on the phone is hard). Neither did I mention anything related to open source to cause you any annoyance.
Linux offers a lot of pick your own adventure style options for everybody. Yes, it takes a bit of time to get used to it, but so does getting used to the cmd/ctrl abomination in Macs. I don't see people complaining about that.
The only application that by default violates the normal keyboard shortcuts is the terminal and even that has menu options for changing them to what you like. I don't know what application doesn't respect common shortcuts to break your muscle memory but I then I am not a distributed systems engineer so what do I know.
