I'll just repost something I wrote on some other thread one time:
I've changed my laptop 4 times now in 5 years for different reasons, when I do so, there's only a couple of things to consider:
if I'm upgrading the HDD (for example when I made the jump from HDD to SSD or from my 2.5inch SSD to my M2 SSD currently) I need to clone the drive to my new storage, otherwise I only need to swap out my storage device from my old laptop to my new one.
With linux it just works I don't have to fiddle for my devices to be found, everything is just where I left it, the biggest change was when I went from an intel based PC to an AMD one, I only had to switch the display drivers after the fact (I knew because X crashed, I had to do this from tty), but it is expected since the display cards are totally different, all it took was a: sudo pacman -S xf86-video-amdgpu and a restart.
having a rolling release distro helps too, because you really don't have a reason to nuke your install and start from scratch, but even if I decided to do that for whatever reason, since most configuration is done via text files I can easily save those in a repo and just clone them to my new install and be done in a few minutes.
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Dec 25 2016 /lost+found
^ that's when I last installed linux, I've been using the same install through 5 years in 4 different devices, it's pretty cool.
Of course I do my research before purchasing a new device, see if there's anything on the arch linux forums that's causing trouble with that particular device, but beyond that, it's all been good for quite a bit, I've never used another OS for this long without doing a hard format and performance hasn't suffered at all, I have almost every development environment available to me one command away (except for Xcode and some Windows specific stuff ofc).
but, my counterpoint is, I feel all OSs are decent enough nowadays and all provide good enough or better functionality OOTB, so for me it has become more subjective than anything, there are strengths and weaknesses to all of them, and I wouldn't be particularly bothered if I had to use one of them because of some requirement or something, but if the choice is mine, it's GNU/Linux
I've changed my laptop 4 times now in 5 years for different reasons, when I do so, there's only a couple of things to consider:
if I'm upgrading the HDD (for example when I made the jump from HDD to SSD or from my 2.5inch SSD to my M2 SSD currently) I need to clone the drive to my new storage, otherwise I only need to swap out my storage device from my old laptop to my new one.
With linux it just works I don't have to fiddle for my devices to be found, everything is just where I left it, the biggest change was when I went from an intel based PC to an AMD one, I only had to switch the display drivers after the fact (I knew because X crashed, I had to do this from tty), but it is expected since the display cards are totally different, all it took was a: sudo pacman -S xf86-video-amdgpu and a restart.
having a rolling release distro helps too, because you really don't have a reason to nuke your install and start from scratch, but even if I decided to do that for whatever reason, since most configuration is done via text files I can easily save those in a repo and just clone them to my new install and be done in a few minutes.
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Dec 25 2016 /lost+found
^ that's when I last installed linux, I've been using the same install through 5 years in 4 different devices, it's pretty cool.
Of course I do my research before purchasing a new device, see if there's anything on the arch linux forums that's causing trouble with that particular device, but beyond that, it's all been good for quite a bit, I've never used another OS for this long without doing a hard format and performance hasn't suffered at all, I have almost every development environment available to me one command away (except for Xcode and some Windows specific stuff ofc).
but, my counterpoint is, I feel all OSs are decent enough nowadays and all provide good enough or better functionality OOTB, so for me it has become more subjective than anything, there are strengths and weaknesses to all of them, and I wouldn't be particularly bothered if I had to use one of them because of some requirement or something, but if the choice is mine, it's GNU/Linux