Linux

I think you are addressing the issues wrong.

Unsupported hardware is a reality in Linux, even if I didn't find any in the last 10+ years, my needs are much more limited.

Controllers do work just fine, as well as Bluetooth, in my experience. Maybe share some issues and let's see why.

Troubleshooting in Linux means understand why stuff don't work as you expect, not copypasta 50 different solutions. There are 50 solutions because there are 100 ways to do stuff and different distros and versions out there. The "unified" experience is from the windows world, not the Linux world.

Nvidia is a known issue on Linux, prrprietary drivers kind of sucks and there are no good open ones, at least for newish nvidia cards. But again, my experience with nvidia has always been very good, with proprietary drivers.

Steam, I used it trough wine to run windows games on Linux, with good success (1 game, so YMMV), and I found it amazing that it was even possible to do. But never used controllers

Wasn't a fan of mint when I tried it. IMO, I found popOS to be an overall better experience when I first started using Linux and have since switched back to it after having a few issues on Fedora.

You might give that a shot especially if you are using nivida. PopOS hasn't given me much grief (aside from Gnome but that's more a personal distaste for it)

Even after being on Linux for a year and considering myself a fairly capable guy in tech, Linux is kind of a pain in the ass if you're doing more complicated things like in my case music production.

But it sounds like you've had an even worse go doing normal things which sucks. I feel for you man. I hope your next go is better.

It took me a few tries and Windows being a privacy nightmare to switch. It can be done but it wasn't (and still isnt) easy.

You're actually right about this. I guess I've just gotten used to discarding most of the "advice" people give and also recognizing when somebody actually knows what they're talking about.

I'm sorry you've had this experience. Hopefully you'll be willing to give Linux another try again in the future and some of your issues have been addressed.

I've been using Linux Mint for 2 weeks now. Everything worked out of the box. No nVidia driver problem, controller works fine, can't speak for Bluetooth since I don't use it. I only scratched my head on the Joplin synchronization with my phone using Syncthing, which was fixed after maybe 10min of tinkering. Haven't rebooted to my backup windows install since. 10/10 would recommend.

Bluetooth - Another nightmare. Bluetooth is terrible on Linux.

Shitty dongles is shittier in Linux, that's true. Never ever had a problem with Bluetooth on laptops.

None of my controllers work with Steam, no matter how many countless hours I’ve spent troubleshooting.

They work with games outside of Steam? If true is a Steam problem, not a Linux one. "But it works with Steam on Windows", well Valve can fuck up and introduce a bug on the Linux version.

I started using mint a year ago and had no such issues. What hardware are you running out on?

tl;dr:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprinting_(psychology)#Baby_duck_syndrome