You don't make Linux work on the hardware at the Desktop level so much as you choose hardware with chipsets that don't flout spec or have else have (open) activ

You don't make Linux work on the hardware at the Desktop level so much as you choose hardware with chipsets that don't flout spec or have else have (open) active support from their vendors. In my experience, very little troubleshooting on Linux is due to Linux being problematic and more oddities and quirks with hardware whose drivers were written only with a particular Windows version in mind. To test, just boot a "problem" distro in a VM. If you don't encounter the same issues, it's the hardware.