Never had a problem with my Thinkpad or my System76 laptop. If something has Windows support directly it's not surprising that it it would run better than something done in the spare time of developers. I've never had terrible luck with any linux on laptops though, aside from the Macbook. What kinds of problems did you run into and on what types of laptops?
Two think pads. They just didn't even come close to the battery life that Windows did. And I'm a very advanced used, been using Arch Linux since 2008, and have every part of my system tweaked. It just seemed like the hardware support and drivers weren't there. Specifically the T440s. I forget what model it was before that one. I'd also get suspend issues on both. I dumped a lot of time into it.
Been running the 5th gen for 6 months with zero problems. In my experience, laptops that don’t have discrete graphics just work.
Yeah I had an Acer before my two thinkpads that has discrete and it was a problem. This was also back in the day when X11 was actually kind of a pain to configure properly. Things are miles better today, but I think after 10 years of messing around with it all I just kind of got burnt out.