Closing the lid on a Windows laptop and being 100% confident it won't decide to wake up either in the middle of the night thus feeling the room with an eerie glow - or in your backpack thus cooking the motherboard.

Well, you can be 100% confident that it will do one of those two things (if not both), so there's that at least.

I'm sorry to say this is an issue everywhere. I've had a mac BSOD from unplugging a dock (doing it while the computer's suspended is/was a surefire way to trigger this particular bug), and linux is even more picky since it depends entirely on the hardware underpinning the dock.

My most reliable dock has been the cheapest one possible - a display port 1.2 adapter that exposes the usb2 port which I've chained to an 8 port hub.

No special drivers required, everything I've connected it to has worked flawlessly including macs, windows, my Samsung phone.

USB2 only seems bad on the surface, but the combined bandwidth of the webcam/mouse/keyboard/mic doesn't come near saturating it.