Linux in general has been the most reliable of any OS I've used in the last 5 years or so. Well, except maybe Android.
Windows is the worst of the worst, but every Linux distro I've tried works great and actually supports every feature of Bluetooth. Unlike Windows, who only implements the barest of minimums, and about half of those features just don't work.
Only in one direction. The microphone is only used by the HFP (hands-free profile), which does not support higher quality codecs. You can't have HFP and audio sink active at the same time, so you are stuck with telephony grade codecs any time the mic is active.
It is much more complicated than that. That 700kbit/s figure is theoretical performance under ideal conditions: one device, one host, no interference.
In the real world, you get a lot less bandwidth. In my office building I see 300-400kbit/s of real throughput. The radio also only has one transceiver, if you connect multiple devices, they have to take turns broadcasting which cuts your bandwidth roughly linearly proportional to the number of nodes.
Also remember that Bluetooth and WiFi share the same spectrum. A high power or very busy WiFi network nearby will also drop Bluetooth bandwidth. You also get a precipitous drop in bandwidth if there are other Bluetooth devices nearby, as they all have to share the same spectrum.
There's a lot of effort put into mitigating these problems, but either way the real world performance of Bluetooth is much, much lower than theoretical figures. Streaming useful audio over a link like this is not a trivial problem.
At work, I'm currently trying to cram ten separate audio streams into a Bluetooth link for reasons. We're switching to WiFi.
I really wish net installers were still popular. For a while, most distros offered a tiny install image, like a few hundred MB that contained just enough to bootstrap the installer to pull the real OS data from the internet (or other network source).
Sometimes I only have small USB2.0 flash drives. I can't fit a full-fat installer on there, and even if I could, my network connection is much faster anyway.
Hell, installers don't even do on-the-fly updates anymore. You install whatever stale packages are in your install media then go through the process of re-downloading and updating every package anyway.
An offline installer makes obvious sense, but in this modern age, an online installer is superior in every way.
Windows is the worst of the worst, but every Linux distro I've tried works great and actually supports every feature of Bluetooth. Unlike Windows, who only implements the barest of minimums, and about half of those features just don't work.