I remember clearly that for years XPS were recommended here as good alternative to MacBooks, I am not in that market but I feel for people being burned by these bad advices.
My main gripes:
For first few months wifi driver was unstable and would randomly cause kernel panics, sometimes once per day, sometimes once per week. (yes I tried manually installing newer versions and using different kernel versions)... eventually it stabilised and I haven't had any issue since - Even though this was not unique to this machine, it was annoying considering it was supposed to be built for Linux.
The battery capacity diminished faster than anything I've ever owned... currently at 20% of original capacity. There was a very sharp drop last year from 80% to 60%, then another sharp drop from 60% to 40% which I'm guessing is the controller writing off cells. (Manually calibrating it by draining never gets it above 30%)... Speculating this is possibly from heat damage (sometimes I will play a game which will get it a bit hot) or just crap battery quality - expecting to find some spicy pockets when I get around to replacing it.
Other than that it's been a solid Linux machine and very comfortable lightweight form factor to use. I still don't have performance issues personally, so will replace the battery soon and see how much longer I can keep using it.
> sometimes I will play a game which will get it a bit hot
Off topic, but how did you configure i3 to work nicely with gaming? Last time I tried i3 with programs that expected to be able to arbitrarily draw windows it didn't work super great.
These days I use Pop!_shell where I might want to game, and Sway where I'll just want terminals and a browser.
However i've also tried out steam occasionally and not had any issues.
What kind of games have you had issues with?
Note i'm using X11 still and no compositor, you mention Sway, maybe these are Wayland specific issues?
[edit]
> I tried i3 with programs that expected to be able to arbitrarily draw windows it didn't work super great
Ahh, if you mean the game needs to draw multiple windows, yeah I've noticed programs that draw lots of floating windows can get into a mess, but I've not really used many of them often. I'm not sure why this is, it's not like they are using the i3wm default floating dimensions or anything.
For games windows that start floating I usually just full screen them or drop them down into tiling mode. But then i've never played a multi window game.
Mostly Windows games through Proton/Wine expecting to be able to take full control of the screen, and then having a panic attack when not allowed to.
As far as programs wanting to draw many floating windows, that's happened with Krita/Inkscape more than games, games just... didn't play nice. I'd get crashes when changing workspaces, when launching a game, so on. That was on i3 itself as well, I didn't switch to sway until after I stopped trying to enforce tiling on everything I do (just most things :P )
I suppose one good thing about Apple and MacBooks is that just because of how incredibly common they are, and the amount of mindshare they command, if there is a fatal flaw with an Apple product, there will be widespread consumer knowledge of the issues. On the other hand, models from Dell and these other manufacturers sell in low enough volumes that they can just keep pumping out broken products, and not enough people will care to hold them publicly accountable.