But for friends/family I'll always recommend ChromeOS. A little less so these days because of the weird Android integration, but the laptops are incredibly cheap and the system is almost impossible to break. I don't need to spend Thanksgiving fixing my Mom's Chromebook, I know its already patched.

The linux containers or what has gotten my attention.

Having desktop linux apps, android and all in one os.

I'm not sure what you're describing here. I've never seen one error after a new install, let alone dozens. The SELinux errors must be pretty rare because I've never had any complaints about them.

More recently I had a Fedora update eat my Broadcom wifi drivers which isn’t fun to fix when you don’t have an easy way to hardwire a connection and your cell connection is too weak to tether reliably.

The touch pad is not even remotely comparable with macOS. No inertia scrolling and overall a clumsy feeling.

Shearing when scrolling is common. The entire UI stutters if I compile some rust in the background.

Key bindings are inconsistent and all over the place.

UI defaults are totally weird with screen estate given up to absurd use cases.

System tray icon are stretched. Debian just released a glibc that completely broke electron. So no slack, vscode or spotify until that was sorted by a third party ppa.

I'm running screaming back to the Mac.

I have been using GNOME with a 4k monitor a year or so. It works fine, including most exceptions. The exception are Gtk+2 applications such as The GIMP and Inkscape. Heck, even Tk applications are scaling. The really big downside is that fractional scaling is not well-supported under GNOME on Wayland (I don't care that it is technically a hack on macOS, it works).

Spotify definitely isn't

spotify --force-device-scale-factor=2.0 works great on my machine.

Shearing when scrolling is common.

For me this has improved when I switched from NVIDIA to AMD. The open source amdgpu driver is great.

Key bindings are inconsistent and all over the place.

Yes, this is very annoying. Even within GNOME applications it is anyone's guess what the shortcuts are. And they are not very discoverable since they have removed menus. To preserve vertical space. On 24" screens.

Debian just released a glibc that completely broke electron.

I take it that you are running Debian unstable?

Look into libunput gestures for the touchpad too if you get the chance.

I had to set an environment variable on startup before Qt apps started scaling properly. Out of the box, the scaling was similar to WinXP—text elements looked good, images were usually too small. With the ‘improved’ auto-scaling switched on, Qt apps also look great.

Wine and Steam handle DPI scaling just fine too. It wasn’t automatically turned on, so you have to squint your way to the appropriate checkbox or slider, but then it’s crisp awesomeness from that point forward.

The JetBrains IDEs that I use for development are all based on Java Swing, and they looked perfect on the first launch.

Color me impressed with HiDPI Linux. The only thing that took a bit of effort was setting up a larger console font and configuring grub to use it in the boot menu. I can’t speak to Fedora, but I suspect it’s similar: a couple setup hurdles, but once you get everything configured right, it looks glorious.

Yes you can use `xrandr --scale` or something on particular screen, but it just spins my CPU like crazy and makes fonts blurry. So if I've to use multiple screen, I use only Emacs/Terminal on the weird one (which I spent most time on working) and start chrome with custom scaling factor.

Mixed DPI screens work fine on Wayland.

Last time I used wayland (on Ubuntu 17.10) I had to install a terminal plug for Chrome (still didn’t work in Chromium) and then tmux attach from there.

Hopefully it’s only a mater of time till that is fixed if it isn’t already.

Contrary to what people here are saying, HiDpi support really isn't ready for the mainstream in my opinion, solely because of the fact that mixed dpi really isn't possible under X or Wayland. If you're using a single monitor, however, HiDpi support is just fine.

That is: If you have a 4k primary display (such as an XPS 13, like I have) and 1080p external display (like the one in my office), then it's basically impossible to work with both.

Under wayland: Native wayland apps (what your DE provides, usually, and QT apps) work fine. Everything else (the majority of programs I find myself using, including Firefox, Chromium, Electron apps, basically anything using Xwayland) will not scale properly when moving from display to display, meaning you can usually only run them on one screen. Once more apps start supporting wayland, I think things will get much better, but that's still a few months (if not a year or so) away.

Under X: You can use some Xrandr hacks to get the second screen working properly, but it either introduces viewport problems (an issue I couldn't get past, but I'm sure others have solved) or screen tearing and general blurriness (another issue I couldn't get past)

So I'd say stick with something else for the coming months. Elementary itself is trash when it comes to supporting external displays: the GUI Settings app - Switchboard - basically bugs out if you try to change external display settings when using a 4k primary monitor, and will render one of the displays unusable. This happens every time. You'll have to use xrandr to configure your monitors by hand, which isn't too bad, but not conducive to the experience Elementary claims to provide.