As noted above, I have experienced it myself on a freshly bought laptop (Thinkpad T14e AMD) that is specifically touted as Linux-friendly. I was genuinely curio

As noted above, I have experienced it myself on a freshly bought laptop (Thinkpad T14e AMD) that is specifically touted as Linux-friendly. I was genuinely curious as to how the battery life varies between Linux and Windows, and so I did a simple test that just did automated Reddit browsing, and left it running. When I saw the results, the disparity was so unexpectedly large that I went to investigate and found out about the hardware accelerated rendering being disabled by default on Linux in both Chrome and Firefox, and why. Then, of course, I was also curious whether their reasoning was grounded, so I manually enabled acceleration and re-run the test - and found out that both Chrome and Firefox will inevitably crash in 2-3 hours of active browsing with it enabled, so they disable it for a reason. As far as "maybe Linux isn't the problem" - you're broadly correct that it's really an issue of hardware quality and/or lack of good first party drivers. But from the end user perspective, if you can't reliably use Linux with popular off-the-shelf hardware, it's not really "ready for the desktop", regardless of where the blame lies. I've been a Linux user for 25 years now, with about a decade of using it as a primary desktop OS, and this exact excuse has been around for as long as I remember (I've used it myself plenty of times way back!). And yet, here we are.