L/S Hedge Funds vs. PE

1) Yes - its still mainly excel but you will find new and creative uses to apply excel which requires a very lite form of thinking of modelling like programming. Not hard whatsoever. You will do a lot of work identifying trends in historical information and seeing where the inflections were and what drove them. Often this will transfer into some form of third-party data analysis that you will be doing in Excel, and potentially in Python.

The role isn't mathsy per say. It is very quantitative and you will need to quantify much of the qualitative arguments you are making/investigating and will work a lot with big datasets.  A few of the IB analysts that make the transition sometimes struggle with this part, you're essentially forecasting the future of a company's earnings and so there's a strong need for being able to look at a narrative quantitively.

2) For L/S seats you will be competing against other people in IB, ER as well as other L/S analysts.

As for what its like, I would read this: https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/comment/3083137#comment-3083137

Ultimately, at MM funds, the job is pretty niche and can often be far removed from what prospective IB analysts assume HF work is like. The need for a defined edge on earnings rather than having a compelling industry/business analysis throws people off. (Funds like AKO, Lansdowne, Egerton etc tend to hire these types out of IB though)