I think what he is saying is, don't buy a cheap-ass Dell that runs Windows 10S, then expect to be development powerhouse where all the hardware works properly. He is suggesting buying a developer-oriented laptop that is designed and supported to be running Linux. You'll have less weird hardware quirks that way.
You can buy a $1000 laptop and still run into issues where your computer won't connect to a projector or a major application refuses to support your platform.
Yep, that's exactly what I meant - and peripherals too. I'm sure a big reason Apple products don't have problems video calling or connecting to projectors is high-end hardware, and I don't think the difference between MacOS and Ubuntu on comparable hardware is anywhere near as striking as their reputations would have you believe.
I really, highly doubt that. Autodetecting and using proper settings for a newly-discovered display device (projector) is fundamentally a software consideration, not hardware: the hardware into which you connect the display is capable of talking to it (maybe not at ideal resolution depending on specs, but whatever), but the OS needs to discover, detect, and configure the new connection properly.
The same is true for Zoom: things like accelerated video streaming are universally supported on laptop GPUs, but software support is spotty for some apps/OSes. Things like screen sharing are 100% software-side.
While I'd love to use a Linux workstation (and often do), it's simply not there yet in those areas. That has nothing to do with "high-end hardware" and everything to do with less robust software support than many alternatives--including MacOS.
I guess you could make the case that because MacOS has to support fewer kinds of hardware, they can spend more time on making software support robust, but I'm neither convinced of that argument nor convinced that's what you meant by your post.
You'd think that, but once I replaced my €5 AliExpress connector cable by a proper one, suddenly I haven't had any issues with projectors any more.
Likewise, if you use an underpowered laptop, or one for which Ubuntu doesn't have proper drivers, you're going to have a hard time using Zoom.
I'm not saying that you'll never have issues (which I'm sure holds for MacOS as well), or even that you might not have slightly more issues than on MacOS (see your last paragraph), but things are definitely not as bad as comments online would have you believe, because many of those can be ascribed to issues like I mentioned above.
