The truth is it varies, largely based on your personal setup.
Personally, I think the "mean tweaking time" of an average Linux is very low now. I spend almost no time forced to tweak things, except maybe a bit after installation. In concrete terms, for me it's usually a few hours of work spread out over the first 3 weeks. It might be 3-20 hours tops, but some of that might be setting up cool new fancy fun things rather than necessary configuration. From then on I rarely have to touch configs for years.
That being said, I do read of some people having really painful bugs that take forever to fix. You can mitigate this by using mainstream distros on well supported hardware. Ubuntu and Fedora are your best bets for stability.
A decade or more ago, tweaking and maintaining felt like a constant Sisyphean struggle. Now I can throw Ubuntu on a laptop and 90% of the time it's fine after installation.
>Even basic stuff like Wi-Fi and the login screen often doesn't work correctly and requires more tweaking.
I haven't had wifi troubles on Linux in over a decade. Nor any login screen issues. Maybe things are better now, or maybe you've had bad luck with the hardware you're using. Ultimately it boils down to your individual setup. I know how frustrating these issues can be. Anyways, good luck!
Personally, I think the "mean tweaking time" of an average Linux is very low now. I spend almost no time forced to tweak things, except maybe a bit after installation. In concrete terms, for me it's usually a few hours of work spread out over the first 3 weeks. It might be 3-20 hours tops, but some of that might be setting up cool new fancy fun things rather than necessary configuration. From then on I rarely have to touch configs for years.
That being said, I do read of some people having really painful bugs that take forever to fix. You can mitigate this by using mainstream distros on well supported hardware. Ubuntu and Fedora are your best bets for stability.
A decade or more ago, tweaking and maintaining felt like a constant Sisyphean struggle. Now I can throw Ubuntu on a laptop and 90% of the time it's fine after installation.
>Even basic stuff like Wi-Fi and the login screen often doesn't work correctly and requires more tweaking.
I haven't had wifi troubles on Linux in over a decade. Nor any login screen issues. Maybe things are better now, or maybe you've had bad luck with the hardware you're using. Ultimately it boils down to your individual setup. I know how frustrating these issues can be. Anyways, good luck!