Two kinds of linux tinkering often get aliased and cause confusion in conversations.

The first kind is the enthusiast changing their init system bootloader and package manager and "neofetch/fastfetch" and WM and... every few weeks.

The second kind is the guy who uses xfce with a hidpi display who has to google and try various combinations of xrandr(augmented with xfwm zoom feature), GDK_SCALE, QT_SCALE_FACTOR, theme that supports hidpi in the titlebar, few icons in the status tray not scaling up(wpa_gui), do all that and find out that apps that draw directly with OpenGL don't respect these settings, dealing with multiple monitors, plugging in hdmi and then unplugging messing up the audio profile and randomly muting chromium browsers, deciding whether to use xf86-* Or modesetting or whatever the fix is to get rid of screen tearing. Bluetooth/wifi. On my laptop for example I had to disable usb autosuspend lest the right hand side USB-A port stop working.

If our threshold for qualifying well-supported hardware is "not even a little tinkering required" then we are left with vanishingly few laptops. For the vast vast majority of laptops, atleast the things I mentioned above are required. All in all, it amounted to couple of kernel parameters, a pipewire config file to stop random static noise in the bluetooth sink and then a few xfce setting menu tweaks (WM window scaling and display scaling). So not that dramatic, but it is still annoying to deal with.

The 2nd kind of tinkering is annoying, and is required regardless of distro/de/wm choice since it's a function of the layers below the de/wm, mostly the kernel itself.