Vanilla Gnome is terrible. You must embrace extensions. At first I loathed the idea, but it's just become part of life. One for a dock, one for weather, one for tray icons, and if you prefer, one for top menu that gives you your more traditional start menu type thing.

Or, there's always Xfce or KDE, of course.

AMD drivers are now open source and finally working well. Nvidia is not, granted.

Bluetooth audio works well, even on rando cheap noname devices I've tried. My primary speakers are some Logitech bluetooth pair.

Don't use wayland. Run gnome in xorg mode.

In fact, I'd go as far as to say I'm blown away by how much -just- works on Linux. My printer is autodetected on the network and print. My wireless mouse works. My monitor runs at 1440p.

If you're open to it, I always suggest using a modern distro that stays up to date because you get better hardware support(if using new hardware, that is). Typically, that means something Arch based, but there are distros around making that simple.