Couldn't agree with you more. Ubuntu was my daily driver from the start of 2007 through early 2014 when I finally gave in and bought a rMBP. Despite missing the "real" nix environment being available right under the GUI, I have been much much happier on the Mac.

I fought software update and driver issues for years. I ran the most bog standard HP laptops that I could get, albeit w/ Nvidia GPUs. Every distribution upgrade there was something that went wrong. One of a list of usual suspects: video driver, power management, and wifi. Things were never completely broken. It would be something like not being able to close the lid, sleep, and properly recover. Or not being able to connect to wifi when coming back from sleep. Or not being able to stay connected to wifi after a couple hours and needing the kernel modules to be removed and reinserted.

I kept a set of hard drives so that I could always move to the next version of the OS on a clean install. I could fall back easily if the next release presented problems. I would tinker and fix the sort of issues you get with these random outlier driver problems and press forward. I had a good regimen going, but ultimately it was the power management issues that wore me down. Randomly finding the battery dead because the laptop didn't sleep when I closed the lid or not being able to properly return from sleep was just too much.

I've been running Linux for 20 years and I'm not willing to put up with these problems on my workstation. It seems like it must be a very small minority that can.

If you're going to have an actual destkop machine maybe you can avoid most of these problems. And maybe these things have been solved finally for laptops, but I wouldn't know, I moved on and haven't looked back.