Man i wish, to this day, no matter the distro its like russian roulette with a revovler loaded with 5 bullets
So there are absolutely millions of Linux users. Either we are all masochists living in constant frustration because we are brothers in brokenness or few long term Linux users have an experience that is similar to yours and are simply trying to help you avoid non-obvious pitfalls that may otherwise lead to a shitty experience
A) First off “well supported” herein means that your hardware is known to be well supported by Linux not that its common, good, expensive, or useful. If you are having a shit experience then there is a good chance its actually not well supported.
B) Lots of “stable” distributions ship with old kernels often as old as 2-3 years old. This means that hardware that came out within the last 2-3 years isn’t supported at all and even older hardware for which support was added recently wont work as advertised. There is no profit in running either the kernel that came out 10 minutes ago or the one that came out 3 years ago. This to me seems to be a common issue. Just run a recent kernel.
C) The barrier to entry to create your own distro is incredibly low. The effort required to make a good one is a lot higher. If you stick to the major distros that have stuck around over the years you will have a more consistent experience.
D) X11 is less experimental than Wayland and less hassle
E) Simple environments like XFCE and Cinnamon and window managers are more consistent and predictable than gnome
F) Flatpaking all the things brings exciting new challenges not forseen by the developers who don’t actually distribute flatpaks. Stay away from unofficial flatpaks and if the developer suggests a system package or an appimage use whatever the developer recommends.
If all this advice seems awfully complicated it could be shorted to buy hardware that comes with Linux and run Mint.