Ooof! That sounds rough and also makes me realise a huge oversight in my original comment.
I've been using linux on desktop for about 12 years and will always pick a laptop that's known to have good compatibility otherwise the endless hardware issues are a big timesuck.
Some distros are better than others for hardware support but I think it'd be disingenious to make out like any solve the problem.
If you have a laptop with good support, or even better, a linux specific one, it really is an experience that can work out of the box.
Maybe that's a big part the appeal of being buy-in-a-shoppable. Somebody has figured out for you what works, and you don't have to be your own guinea pig.
> Some distros are better than others for hardware support
I did some reading around the and consensus seemed to be that Ubuntu should be one of these. Do you have any suggestions that are likely to have better hardware support than Ubuntu?
No, it's not a distro problem. You need to use a laptop that has good Linux support, one that has hardware well supported by the mainline kernel or through well-maintained easily installable modules. System76 makes such laptops, for example.
I ran Linux on the desktop and then laptop for 8 years ish when I was younger. It was a huge timesink. It taught me a lot about how systems actually work (what is a kernel, what is a kernel driver, why does crashing kernel code hurt worse than crashing user code, what is pid 1, why do daemons double fork, etc etc) but now as an adult with a busy life I don't see myself using Linux like this again. I can probably debug issues much faster than I could when I was younger but the last thing I want to do with my free time is figure out why runit couldn't spawn the log service to tail my logs for the service that I tried to run.
maybe pop os in that I think they ship some additional drivers in top of Ubuntu's, but I doubt it'd make a difference. Ubuntu was a great choice for driver support, but like you found, that sadly doesn't mean everything will work on every machine.
I've been using linux on desktop for about 12 years and will always pick a laptop that's known to have good compatibility otherwise the endless hardware issues are a big timesuck.
Some distros are better than others for hardware support but I think it'd be disingenious to make out like any solve the problem.
If you have a laptop with good support, or even better, a linux specific one, it really is an experience that can work out of the box.
Maybe that's a big part the appeal of being buy-in-a-shoppable. Somebody has figured out for you what works, and you don't have to be your own guinea pig.