I don't know how rare it is, but it hasn't really been painless on laptops from my experience. I've had to deal with trying to find the right kernel parameters to stop my laptop from freezing, to having an incredibly high default scroll speed which I've still haven't figured out how to change, to having to ask the orange alien place to figure out why my Internet card was not working. It may just seem like a hassle to some people, but I believe for most, it's enough of a hassle to just give up and go back to Windows.
Last time I used Ubuntu it had made some really bad UI decisions. The scrollbars and grab areas to resize windows was 1px wide, making it pretty mich impossible to use. There was no setting in the system preferences, but I had to run some command overwriting some config ...
I switched my old-ish laptop to EndeavorOS (based on Arch, btw), a few months back, as my first Linux experience. After a week or so of hiccups and getting things the way I like it, it's been an amazing experience. Ridiculously stable. Better than Windows 11 even. I'll never go back.
Yeah I have one laptop that doesn't play nice with default Debian drivers, and even the special .iso with a bundle of different wifi drivers, still can't connect during install. Debian derived distros all work fine, but Debian itself gives me problems with that one machine. Hate when it happens, but sometimes you just gotta try out a distro with different default settings.
I don't know how rare it is, but it hasn't really been painless on laptops from my experience. I've had to deal with trying to find the right kernel parameters to stop my laptop from freezing, to having an incredibly high default scroll speed which I've still haven't figured out how to change, to having to ask the orange alien place to figure out why my Internet card was not working. It may just seem like a hassle to some people, but I believe for most, it's enough of a hassle to just give up and go back to Windows.
Last time I used Ubuntu it had made some really bad UI decisions. The scrollbars and grab areas to resize windows was 1px wide, making it pretty mich impossible to use. There was no setting in the system preferences, but I had to run some command overwriting some config ...
I switched my old-ish laptop to EndeavorOS (based on Arch, btw), a few months back, as my first Linux experience. After a week or so of hiccups and getting things the way I like it, it's been an amazing experience. Ridiculously stable. Better than Windows 11 even. I'll never go back.
Yeah I have one laptop that doesn't play nice with default Debian drivers, and even the special .iso with a bundle of different wifi drivers, still can't connect during install. Debian derived distros all work fine, but Debian itself gives me problems with that one machine. Hate when it happens, but sometimes you just gotta try out a distro with different default settings.