I think machine compatibility plays a huge role, some machines do mostly ‘just work’ while others are a pain. It also definitely requires some tinkering, though mostly on setup or on the first week or two in my experience.

Also, ymmv and a lot of people swear by them but I’ve never had good luck with Ubuntu based distro, they’ve always been super buggy with hard to track fixes for me. I like fedora a lot better and it similarly has decent (though not nearly as extensive) community support for weird bugs, but I know people swear by many things.

Yeah, I’ve had one hardware glitch that support sent me a detailed video how to fix by resetting the mainboard within a few hours of writing them, fixed it within 10 minutes. Other than that any issues I’ve had are linux-funkiness, like odd sound profiles on the speakers that I could fix myself, and have been gradually taken care of through updates along the way.