For me, Fedora has worked pretty well. It helps to run on less than bleeding edge hardware for which the drivers are mature. Also, while you still can, to dis

For me, Fedora has worked pretty well. It helps to run on less than bleeding edge hardware for which the drivers are mature. Also, while you still can, to disable Wayland in favour of Xorg. With that done, on the typical 5 year old laptop, you tend to get (no guarantee, but in my experience) flawless suspend/resume, decent battery life/thermal management, wifi, bluetooth (with the very latest Fedora 35 and Pipewire, bluetooth headphones finally work reliably with all audio profiles), the custom buttons on the keyboard, performant WebGL and so on. That being said, nothing is perfect. For example you still can't drag a window halfway across between the laptop's screen and an external HiDPI display and expect it to scale so that the two halves are the same size. And some recent gadgets may only "sort of" work. Example, a USB audio dongle (for headphone jack-less smartphones) from the dollar store. Works but only exposes three volume levels: Off, medium and crazy loud. But what do you expect, if the open source drivers all need to be updated by volunteers after the gadget is already out there, use gadgets that are more mature. What does work is that the resulting machine will be stable. So much so that you can leave it with your 80 year old mom, who lives 8 hours' drive away, and expect less trouble than with a Windows machine (we don't have Apple products).