I installed a bunch of different distributions and most of them worked well.
To say that "Linux doesn't work on laptops very well" because you had a terrible experience with a single distribution is odd. Especially when many of those distros have pretty good user communities and wikis that tell you what does or doesn't work, and how to fix stuff that's not working.
But the wider point - there are a gazzillion different distributions and sometimes there's no way of knowing if they'll work on your hardware apart from just installing it. Which does suck.
I wouldn't have mentioned it if it hadn't gelled with just about every experience of installing Linux on a laptop that I have ever read! Broken wifi, broken suspend and broken trackpad seem just par for the course. (I am sure that the 3D acceleration wouldn't have worked either, had I bothered to try to get that far.)
I just thought it was a particularly amusing example of the phenomenon.
I installed a bunch of different distributions and most of them worked well.
To say that "Linux doesn't work on laptops very well" because you had a terrible experience with a single distribution is odd. Especially when many of those distros have pretty good user communities and wikis that tell you what does or doesn't work, and how to fix stuff that's not working.
But the wider point - there are a gazzillion different distributions and sometimes there's no way of knowing if they'll work on your hardware apart from just installing it. Which does suck.