I've done nothing to make sure all my hardware worked on my favorite flavor of linux. My special keys also worked out of the box.

In addition I've spent exactly 0 minutes in the last 5 years figuring out hardware issues. You may have less success if you want to game or need 4+ monitor support; However I've been very happy in recent years with hardware support. There is literally nothing I've encountered in popular hardware that caused me any issues.

tsk tsk there are quite a few infuriating time machine settings that need to be changed out of the box

1) Time machine really shouldn't be running every hour. To change the period:

    # defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto StartInterval -int <number_of_seconds>

2) TM support for non-time-capsule NAS drives is shaky (even with those that claim to support time machine)

    # defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

That's the one you use to get focus follows mouse on MacOS X.

is that for UEFI or BIOS?