If you decide to delve deeper into Linux then it pretty much becomes a high investment -> high reward thing. There's a learning curve, but you can customize everything to be exactly how you want, and there are no black boxes whatsoever.
What does this mean in practice? You set it up once, exactly the way you like it, and it runs stable forever. It has no misfeatures constantly shoved down your throat (like with e.g. Windows, with AI, ads, telemetry and bloat). Your UI doesn't go through pointless redesigns every few years (like with Windows and macOS) if you don't want to. If you don't like something you can peek under the hood and change it.
The total amount of time I've spent maintaining my Linux system (or in your parlance: "getting it to work") over the last decade is, I don't know, maybe a dozen hours? But yes, if you're a beginner this is indeed unrealistic.
> You set it up once, exactly the way you like it, and it runs stable forever.
No it doesn't. You still have security patches to install and stuff. And one minor patch can still introduce a breaking change that largely destroys your install.
Pretending that this can be mitigated because it's open source goes straight back to my RTFM comment. You're basically saying that someone has to learn a ton of computer science stuff to be able to use Linux. I'm saying that cannot and should not be the case.
Linux based operating systems have to be able to be used to most of their capability by someone with less than a K-12 education. Anything short of that is a non-starter.
And the more RTFM style talk I hear about getting Linux to work, the more I want to buy a bunch of Mac Minis instead. I have actual work to do.