McGovern: Handing over

Yeah, if you buy a Macbook or something you should expect that sound, etc. are going to "just work." But that comes with a lot of trade-offs if you don't want to do things the Apple way, etc. And are OK with a perfectly functional device going EOL when Apple stops updating macOS for it. And don't mind being limited in options if the device requires a repair, etc... But if you have the money to live in the Apple ecosystem and don't object to its limitations / proprietary-ness, it can certainly be convenient.

In my limited experience the Windows ecosystem can be less painful or a lot more painful than Linux depending.

I hear a lot of complaints about PulseAudio, etc. and I believe that some users definitely run into problems. I haven't, myself, run into very many issues -- and that's having run Fedora and RHEL desktops as well as PopOS and others. I expect there are lots of users who use these things quite happily without issue. I've never been clear if the problem(s) are of trying to do things that weren't use cases they expected or hardware related or what. It seems like they do pretty well with way fewer resources than what Microsoft or Apple likely throw at the problem, though. (Not to mention far less control to dictate things...)