My personal "linux" laptops have been on various flavors of opensuse since the 11.x releases when I discovered for the first time, that linux was actually doing everything correctly (backlight dimming, standby/hibernate, wifi, sound, accelerated graphics, docking/undocking) out of the box. (I've been running linux in various forms since the 1990s).
Opensuse, is not been perfect by any means, I had to hack the bluetooth driver with the latest dell when I initially installed it, but within a year or so that got fixed too.
So, there really isn't any "ubuntu" magic, and I might go so far as to say if you want really good support on the latest hardware you should be running fedora. But in general all the major distros are working roughly the same at this point with one or the other working better on any given piece of hardware.
I'm not going to argue about distros. I works magically for me. It might not for you, and that's fine.
My point was: my year of Linux on the Desktop arrived 10 years ago.
The Linux on the Desktop arrived a decade ago for me, so your assertion puzzles me deeply.