You're re-framing the context of "doing their homework".

I agree you shouldn't be doing any homework to perform basic tasks such as "get [the] machine to hibernate, connect to wifi reliably, etc...". I'm not doing any of it on my Thinkpad, where these tasks work without messing around.

And in an ideal world, yes, I'd love not having to ever think about it too :) . But in the current Windows-dominated non-Mac consumer hardware world, what I say is that you should be doing homework prior to buying a machine you expect to install Linux on.

OP meant on what machine to buy (something you'd probably do before buying a Windows laptop anyway). But if like me can't be bothered with even this then just buy a system 76 or an xps with ubuntu pre-installed... No homework required.