Only if your chance on a "good" compatible laptop. Else all bets are off. The BT/wifi might not work, the video drivers might be problematic, the laptop might not sleep when you close the lid, the fans might blare all the time, and so on.
And even at that, it changes from release to release, whatever the fancy of e.g. Gnome devs strikes them for a non-compatible change, critical functionality is implemented in a ho-hum way, and so on.
And you also need to delve into the minutiae, to know that you should go for "Cinnamon on Fedora" over, e.g. Mint, or Ubuntu (and perhaps the proponents of the latter would say Fedora is shit, and so on).
Problems are always solved by "chose other hardware" and "get another distro".
So there's no need of "Windows Certified"? I had a fair deal of the problems you described on Windows laptops (private and company provided, all certified for Windows, no less).
Linux desktop has its fair share of problems, but Windows runs far from flawless either. I liked Windows when it didn't spy on users but after switching to Linux I was positively surprised. And some stuff I really care for such as incremental remote backups with a decent user interface runs way better on Linux.
While I'm sure people have the problems you describe I haven't had them on laptops in the last decade at least, everything has pretty much worked out the box (except Nvidia which works but requires a kicking sadly).
Gtk and Qt still don't offer a full UI stack with all the Win32 features, guaranteed to be available in all customer desktops.
Basic stuff comparable to DirectDraw, DirectText or a audio stack that doesn't get rebooted every now and then.
SDL is perfectly comparable, except vastly less of a clunky ancient pain in the ass. That is why almost every 2d indie game uses it and not DirectDraw, so to say linux has nothing comparable to DirectDraw is stupid.
Yeah, maybe I should state Direct2D as well to see what your answer would be.
So what is the Linux answer to DirectText? Surely not SDL.
Freetype and Cairo are the direct equivalent of Direct2d and DirectWrite (which is what i suspect you mean by DirectText) which virtually everything on linux uses.
You keep bringing up these arguments as though they are show stoppers and yet people using Linux as a desktop never mention them.
My mum's been on Linux since 12.04 and has never once said "You know what I need DirectText" users don't care how text gets on the screen only that text gets on the screen.
Edit: should mention she doesn't just use it as a glorified browser container she uses libre office, gimp and a few other programs, organises her music and all the stuff an average user her age would do on windows.
To her it is entirely a functional windows replacement, enough that when I upgrade her machine her request was "can I have that minty thing?"
It’s fast, stable, well laid out and very easy to configure.
It also plays well with both gtk and qt apps.
It took a long time but Linux did catch up it’s just by the time it did desktops are less relevant to average people.