Unless its vendor supported day 1, always buy an older gen laptop where other people have done the hard yards to get all the bits and pieces working correctly.
If that's too much hassle, just run WSL2 on Windows.
I've just moved to WSL2 - its from Microsoft so no qualms if you want to use it on a corporate laptop, and honestly there is no GUI software I want to use on Linux that isn't available on Windows anyway.
I'd rather deal with many of the issues the op faces than deal with Microsoft Windows in its current iteration. Fortunately, I don't have to do either.
In 2020 I made it work for me with 'systemctl hybrid-sleep'. Audio worked most of the time, although sometimes I had problems with the Thinkpad plugged into an actual docking stations with additional ports.
It's even worse at it varies from distro to distro. My laptop had battery life issues and some graphical issues[1] in Ubuntu but worked fine in Pop!_OS, even being an Ubuntu based distro.
In my experience, those "for dummies" distros are the best to not have those kind of issues, like Pop!_OS, Linux Mint, or Elementary, but with so much closed source in hardware manufacturers it's normal to the community to don't be able to give a solution in a short time period.
[1]: It has dual Intel and AMD hybrid graphics, so it's understandable to some degree.
It's 2012: Linux has issues with battery life, issues with audio, non-working suspend
It's 2016: Linux has issues with battery life, issues with audio, non-working suspend
It's 2020: Linux has issues with battery life, issues with audio, non-working suspend
It's 2024: Linux has issues with battery life, issues with audio, non-working suspend