I'm typing this on my "workstation" but, sitting here on my desk, there's a laptop running Debian on either side of it (and there's another one across the room).

I can't read your mind so I'm not sure what issues you've encountered attempting to run Debian on a laptop. Apparently I have already figured out how to workaround them (but I've also been using Debian for ~23 years so perhaps that has something to do with it).