Bought an Intel NUC, installed Ubuntu, no hardware-accelerated video decoding on Firefox and Chromium needed to be compiled manually with a patch.

This functionality works out of the box on Windows (not that I installed it, as Windows 10 is a dealbreaker to me so I ended up returning the NUC and choosing something else).

Here's a counter example. Buy a thinkpad and try to put whatever distro you want on it.

Have a thinkpad X1 Carbon Pro and have run fedora, ubuntu and Qubes OS on it at various points. Have Ubuntu on it now (as that's the distro my company wants everyone to use). In all of those distros the install has been completely trouble-free and everything works completely fine.

Also I don't use wayland and don't have the scaling perf problem that someone else was talking about.

Have an X1 Yoga here with Arch on it, it was painless.

Bought an X390 for my mom last year, tossed Ubuntu on it after putting in a larger NVMe. (she prefers to use a more 'mainstream' distro so she can follow tutorials to setup new dev environments for things she's tinkering with) Her Macbook Air is weighing down paper now.

The Air is actually a quite good Ubuntu machine, I used it for several years, years ago.

I just did. 202p Lenovo T490. Installed Linux Mint on all three of them, one for me and the rest for family members.

Everything works out of the box