I got a Pixel 8a more than a year ago to use GrapheneOS. Its performance is somewhat similar to my Poco X4 GT but it runs a little bit hotter specially when running a private space. Last month it died immediately while I was using it. The phone immediately turned off without any warning. The problem was found to be a hardware one and that some component (i guess it was a transistor) was shorting in the board. Luckily there was a shop near me that was able to repair it.

If it weren’t for GOS and maybe for its camera, I would not use and recommend pixels with its very mediocre performance and possible hardware problems.

I have an HP victus with linux installed which I use for work. It is heavy and cumbersome to carry always and thus I decided to get a lightweight laptop with good battery life. I was considering to get an M chip macbook and to install linux but later found out that HDMI out function is broken at that time. Instead I opted to get a second hand Thinkpad X1 carbon and it served me well since. My only gripe is that it only has 8 gb of ram that can’t be upgraded. If you prioritize battery life, the M chip macbooks really is your only choice but if you have some time to tinker with linux, you can maybe get around 10 hrs of battery life at least for me with my Thinkpad.

My friend who uses Linux mint on a hybrid nvidia laptop faces similiar issues with you. He had gone a lot of trouble on having his Nvidia GPU to work reliably and on some issues with bluetooth which can be attributed to issues with the DE’s interface with the bluetooth driver/hardware. I had similar problems with bluetooth years ago when I used gnome on arch linux but it resolved itself later maybe due to some updates. Recently he was faced with problems on updates on his system which borked his DE and just landed him on a console, which was enough for him to restore his system to a previous working state. I think that the hacks and tinkers he they have done to solve the previously said problems (and others I may not be aware of) may have caused the update problem.

As for me I haven’t had those problems. This was recent though because years ago you really would be doing a lot of manual tinkering to even make windows games to run on linux. I’m running KDE now on arch and it is even much more stable than my windows partition which I dual boot. Heck, its the windows updates that causes problems on my linux partition.

My friend has similar opinions with you that linux is still not as good as windows and its infuriating specially when it does not work. It may have been because both of you may have chosen a distro not right for your needs and use case. Linux Mint may be touted as a beginner distro for switchers from windows, but I think that this may not be the case for most since some of those who switch are tinkers or may have specific use cases which Linux Mint is not built in mind or incapable of offering. Using Linux though is a learning experience. It maybe easier than ever to jump on linux now but it is still fundamentally different from windows and that some steps from there does not apply here. There’s a lot of suggestions and advice on this thread and I suggest that you try some of them.