Sounds to me like your colleague did not use a laptop supporting Linux (did he try to ask Dell directly?), in which case it would not be "work" but amateur "tin

Sounds to me like your colleague did not use a laptop supporting Linux (did he try to ask Dell directly?), in which case it would not be "work" but amateur "tinkering". Even if it does install and seem to work well at first, a non-supported device can break the OS install any time due to some driver / firmware change etc., and you'd have no one to blame but yourself — no promise was ever made by Dell or Linux that this particular device+OS would work. It's just not what you should do in a business / work setting. We use supported devices — for Ubuntu, for RHEL, for ZFS, for pfSense, for VMware or Xen or HyperV, etc. — because we need someone to call when things don't work, and we need to be sure they just won't fail or break 99.99% of the time. Short of that, you're on your own, and it's no revelation that Windows works on all laptops but Linux simply doesn't — it works "most of the time", "with some caveats quite often". Blame manufacturers who don't write drivers for Linux (looking at you, Qualcomm, Nvidia...), blame OEMs who select those parts for their machines, but don't blame Linux itself — you get it for free with more than 4,000 drivers included last I checked.