My experience is pretty limited and I might just be lucky in that everything worked for me, but installing linux was exactly as hard as installing windows. If anything, I found it less annoying because with Windows I tend to decline a lot of their services (no cloud, no office, etc) and I profoundly resent being nagged by MS to use services that don't interest me.

If I bought my laptop with linux preinstalled, I wouldn't say that it has been less usable than a windows machine. there is some missing support, but I had similar issues with switching from mac to windows and back.