OK, now I get it. Yes, my experiences with Linux have been ridiculously good for a long time, but that is indeed also due to being careful with what I buy.

Nowadays it's generally gotten pretty easy compared to a few years back, but there are still rough edges there.

I also expect this is more of an issue with cheaper solutions? Because nothing I touched in the last 10+ gave me any real problem. With maybe the exception of getting NVidia Optimus to work?

For a company it wouldn't be so unreasonable to say "we'll transition to Linux over this period of time" and replace incompatible hardware as you progress. The hardware replacement will be a small fraction of your switching costs.

The company I work at has decided to be Linux centric a long time ago, and basically all laptops are years old refurbished Thinkpads that run just fine with no intervention and no hacking.

But the university where I worked at before had a framework deal with Dell, and while I was one of the few people using Linux, I never had trouble with hardware compatibility on those Optiplex and Latitude. To the point that when I was getting a new machine, I would clone the old partition and just boot into a perfectly working system.

I use Arch, BTW.