What laptop are you using, if you don't mind my asking? Is there somewhere where someone has explicitly listed out the laptops that are most compatible with most Linux distros?
I don't know about a list of models but most laptops work quite fine for me. Usually I prefer Intel and nVidia so that might or might not have something to do with it. I've got an Asus N56VB S4054H myself and replaced the HDD with a Plextor 256GB SSD.
Or not. I didn't change my default settings and I'm not running Linux Mint or Ubuntu or some other newbie friendly distro. It's just all taken care of. At least games run fine, though it must be said that the games I play are either from '99 or not graphics-heavy. Factorio is the heaviest one.