[ShockedUnicorn]

I'm unsure what you mean with mainstream laptop, but with my Asus zenbook I had these problems:

* Sleeping doesn't work, hibernate sometimes work

* Keyboard buttons for screen brightness doesn't work

* Ambient light sensor doesn't work

* Vsync doesn't work

* Processor always highly clocked, draining battery

I was able to fix some of the issues in Ubuntu by compiling kernel addons of some sort. When I switched to Arch I could with the help of their Wiki fix all of the issues, but there was lot of text config files to edit, and some more compiling of kernel stuff. Even after that I still couldn't get vsync to work properly. Watching youtube while the screen is tearing all the time is very annoying.

If you want to run linux you should get a laptop that is validated to work, like framework or validated dell laptops. At least then you might only need to fix one or two issues.

[wereallterrrist]

Power-profile-daemon, wayland, and running a somewhat recent kernel will likely resolve these except the keyboard shortcuts (though, likely a newer libinput with wayland instead of X will also resolce this).

Which zenbook? Ill try to find one here to validate explicitly.

Its hard to have these conversations sometimes because people use old versions of meh distros and then carry their anecdotes forward for years.

I literally cannot find a Zenbook on the market that has hardware that should have these issues. I'd really, really like to know what custom kernel patches (really?) you were taking to get hardware to work.

[opan]

Have you tried Wayland to fix the tearing?