It's pretty ironic to have problems with audio not recognizing headphones... on WINDOWS.
Multi-trillion (10^12) dollar company, btw.
(Both laptops are reasonably new.)
Hot take: There is not now, nor has there ever been, a non-janky OS.
Some Linux distributions are absolutely less janky than Windows at the moment, though, absolutely.
I haven't used a mac in a few years, but it was pretty jank-free the last time I tried it, but I'm certain the situation there has gotten worse.