[alpaca128]

In my experience you get the best results by going for hardware that's known to be compatible and use either Linux Mint(or maybe MX Linux) if you don't want to bother to touch the system, or something Arch-based if you want to be able to just install anything and have it work. In the long term I chose the latter and now after 2 years it's the longest time I've not reinstalled Linux, and I've had fewer issues than with Windows 10 and distros like Ubuntu. One or two times a year it's had problems but nothing a few quick googles couldn't fix. For development it's great because I get almost all the libraries and utilities in the current version right from the package manager.

All that said when you want Free software you'll have to make sacrifices unfortunately.