The other problem for Linux I have encountered recently that burned through my free time was updateing the bios, there are no bios updates with Linux installers, which is annoying because the bios is update is OS agnostic. I had to create a bootable USB drive from a windows program (luckily I have a Windows PC for work) and boot from that. But the how-to guide from HP was lacking in details, and on one PC the program doesn't allow me to create the drive on one PC for use on another, so no bios update there.
The problems I have with Linux never seem to be to do with Linux, it is almost always hardware manufacturers being obstinate and refusing to share their toys with other adults.
I also don't plan to purchase any brand new Apple hardware. I will only adopt Apple hardware late (and used) and will only run OS X if absolutely necessary for some reason.
AMD have demonstrated that trying to do the right thing will get you shit from the maintainers and abuse from bystanders, who will then go and buy Nvidia because it gets a better frame rate.
Having a driver is good, but putting it in-kernel is bad if the kernel devs can't read it and fix it.
That has been the case for a decade or so now. 95% is not enough (for non-tinkerers)
For me, major distributions work out of the box. For example, with my T430s, everything works, including the fingerprint reader and WWAN.
[edit] and this is with any distro, perhaps with more or less setup work