My experience is generally it doesn’t just work straight away unless it’s something I’ve hammered out myself
I am also using one of the more DIY distros and window managers though, so I wouldn’t expect it to without some attention from me to get it hammered out first
That said, once it’s hammered out it continues to work exactly the way I want it to, it doesn’t spy on me, it doesn’t shove ads down my throat every 5 minutes
Would be an interesting experiment to see how non techy windows/mac users would get on if you just put stock mint/pantheon on their systems but I get the feeling it would not be as smooth as if they just had the thing everyone knows all the flaws of already