They work in a pinch but even on windows they always end up causing more trouble than it’s worth. I recently got a client business, a lawyer’s office, where their previous IT got them all Startech displaylink docks. After I replaced a couple of them where the users had some lower end i3 laptops, searches they ran in their document management system finished in maybe 50% of the time.
Good processors like the M1 you maybe can’t notice but they cripple the lower end systems.
I was entering my teens in the early 2000’s. My memory is terrible but my family got a pentium 3 desktop PC and I remember I had some versions of SuSE, Ubuntu and Mandrake (or was it Mandriva by then) on that PC at one time or another. My family never knew how to use it because it was different all the time. Heck I didn’t know how to use it.
When I built my first PC, a pentium 4, I dual booted windows and some flavour of Linux for a time, but I got into PC gaming so I only casually checked out new releases of Ubuntu over the years. Once Proton arrived though it was finally time to make the switch.
I’m not a developer, I made a pong clone with python once because I wanted to learn for the sake of it, but I support a few projects financially that I enjoy, I try to submit bug reports best I can. For the most part the community is great, and yes I use Arch btw.