The more things change, the more they stay the same?
I used to use desktop Linux from the late 90s until roughly 2005. So not the earliest adopter, but definitely the scary old days.
For the most part, was happy with it but moved on to Mac OS X because it had much better integration, particularly with laptops.
This year, I jumped ship back to Dell when it became clear that the Mac platform isn't as compelling as it used to be. I have an XPS 15 9560, so pretty new hardware. Very well reviewed. Installed Ubuntu Linux 17.04 because that's what I'm most comfortable with on servers. For the most part, everything has worked fine but not without some hassle.
* I don't need discrete GPU in Linux, so using just the nouveau driver. Had to use kernel option nouveau.modeset=0 to prevent occasional kernel panics.
* WiFi throughput is very crappy with the Killer 1535 NIC that Dell uses. This might be a TCP bug, but I'll probably just throw an Intel 8265 (or 9260) in there when I'm motivated enough.
* Recently installed the latest 1.3.4 BIOS and now the machine just hard locks every few hours. Nothing in syslog to clue what the problem might be, but it was definitely right after the BIOS upgrade. Googled like crazy but nobody else is reporting the same problem with this BIOS and Linux. Earlier I gave up and downgraded back to 1.1.3 (1.2.4 had horrible reviews).
Overall, the software experience is pretty good but obviously I can't solve why the latest BIOS causes hard locking. There's a fair amount of Linux on Dell XPS 15 info out there, but I don't geek out on troubleshooting as much as I used to.
Fedora is getting good reviews lately, but I prefer Debian-based distros. Also it's a bit of a pain to back up /home and then reinstall.