[_cbdev]

I've never had those problems with my laptops (though I exclusively use Thinkpads). Multi-monitor works pretty well out-of-the-box with the big desktop managers (Gnome/KDE), and even using xrandr manually is not that hard.

Audio with alsa has also been a painless experience for me, though I heard differently from some people.

Using Debian (which is not well known for always having the most up-to-date releases), I've as of yet never had to compile my own kernel to enable any of these.