I'm having kinda the opposite experience, but it's less to do with Linux and more to do with hardware, firmware and manufacturers.

MiniPC network device doesn't have a Linux driver. At all. Had to get a vibe-coded, reverse engineered one. This was a first for me.

NAS (ugreen) was a pain in the ass to install my own OS on (I didn't trust theirs, wanted OpenSUSE, and had to get a reverse engineered LED controller driver so I could display hard drive health)

ASUS Laptop will not sleep properly, and would drain the battery flat in a day or do. Myself & Claude gave up after days of trying various tricks workarounds (up to BIOS hacks). The best I can do is hibernate (after about 5 minutes of sleep) but man, the hacky bullshit required to get there was incredible.

Different laptop sleeps fine but will not, under any circumstances, hibernate. Even though I have all the crazy tricks up my sleeve from the ASUS that won't sleep properly and needs to hibernate. Different hardware, totally different bullshit problems.

And then I recently got an Macbook M1 Max for local LLM hacking and everything just fucking works. I don't like MacOS but the hardware is amazing and the OS just fucking works with it (and I like that).

You expect Linux to work on anything you deicde install it on. That is the wrong approach. Get hardware that is well supported, then Linux works well too.