Laptop Ports: Is USB-C only fine, or should I get HDMI,USB,Audio if I need them?

Contrary opinion: USB-C sucks for any sort of demanding use case, especially video (i.e., gaming monitors). There are so many different versions and specs that all fit into one lookalike cable/connector but which will fail in various ways, usually at some combination of refresh rate, resolution, HDR, etc. HDMI is so much more reliable (though not without its issues) and DisplayPort is even better, though that's rare to see on a laptop. If your monitor supports a USB-C input, there's a good chance it will work with your laptop (especially Windows), but the situation on Linux and Mac can be very different. If it only has a HDMI input and you don't want to waste time exploring the different USB-C video modes, a HDMI output on the laptop and good cable will make it much, much simpler.

Audio is probably fine... the standards there don't change as much.

Ethernet is hit-or-miss for me. On my Macbook with an expensive ($300ish) dock, the port works 90% of the time... 10% of the time it'll just randomly shut off until restart. Another USB-C ethernet dongle (with only that one port) works 100% of the time. But either is a PITA compared to a built-in ethernet port in the laptop.

I don't have a choice now that I've gone to Macs, but if I were buying a Windows/Linux workstation PC, I'd absolutely get all the ports I can – ESPECIALLY HDMI and ethernet. USB-C is a nice idea with terrible real-world implementations that are usually 75% compatible but almost never 100%.

> Audio is probably fine... the standards there don't change as much.

As long as you don't care about latency.

For example, if you wind up with your 4K monitor sharing the same PCI-E lanes as your low latency audio device, you're in for a world of hurt.

Note: the problem here isn't USB-C, per se, as much as the fact that a device over USB-C can request so much data that it can hog the backend bus enough to cause issues with latency.

That probably happens, but if it happens it is due to bad implementations.

USB is not like Ethernet, in USB it is possible to reserve an amount of data transfer capacity for latency-sensitive applications like audio and then none of the other users of the USB interface can use it during the reserved time intervals.

If a USB audio device does not use this kind of data transfers with reserved bandwidth (isochronous transfer), its designers have been incompetent.

If the audio is transferred over DisplayPort or over HDMI, then there the time intervals for transferring it are reserved too, so it must not be influenced by anything that is transferred at the same time.

Problems with audio being perturbed by other transfers over PCIe, before reaching the USB controller or the GPU for audio over DisplayPort or HDMI, are unlikely to be caused by hardware but by the operating system, which might not give adequate priority to the audio transfers.