With all but the most popular hardware you are pretty much on your own. It usually drops down to getting some debian drivers and understanding your system. It's all doable, but it's time consuming.
Still I don't think any distribution comes close to being so well organized and nice overall. It seems to take security seriously. It's just too bad that it became so unpopular. It's really hard to use it to a full potential without becoming a contributor nowadays. Which is fine if that's what you want to do but there are times when you want your OS to be your tool not your hobby. With more popularity it could be a very productive tool.
I really, really, really wanted to be able to recommend Ubuntu, and for a long while it was REALLY good, so I could. But then something happened inside Canonical, (I guess they turned into clowns?) and they started releasing software that would just break _bad_ on upgrade. (In fact, had I not spent so much time developing my sysadmin skills with Gentoo, I would have been unable to recover from the upgrade problems I ran into.)
Upgrading Ubuntu LTS scars me and CentOS just wasn’t upgradable at all.
That was the last time I used Ubuntu.
> ... after all if you need the compiler is it that painful to run `apt install -y build-essential`?
No, of course not. But that's when it became obvious to me that I was not the target audience for that distribution, and had switched to Gentoo shortly after.
If you want server grade stability and Debian/Ubuntu-like feel, then go with Debian. Basic install is quite clean (not gentoo/arch level but very clean compared to *buntu).
Th only thing that sometimes requires a bit of elbow grease is the update process (emerge @world) which can throw up large lists of "blockers", especially when some major component changes (like say the transition from python2 to python3). "eselect news" gives ample warning beforehand.
This is the reason I never advise new linux users to use it, but I also don't see myself using any different distribution.