Install a modern distro. It does just work. I've literally done zero config to my laptop, nothing has broken or not worked. Literally everything works. Touchpad, touchscreen, webcam, fingerprint reader, stylus, suspend, audio, etc...
Always love how arrogant Linux users are: "You can't possibly experience something different from me"
I wanted to make a genuine effort to get into using Linux because it's the only OS I'm not super comfortable admin'ing. I bought a secondhand Lenovo t440 and installed Linux Mint on it. Everything seemed to work well, boot was nice and quick, no issues with WiFi chipset or sleep and battery life was at least okay.
It was fine for browsing the web with Firefox for my normal web browsing, and made a great netflix machine.
Then I kept trying to do other things. I was playing with Blender at the time and despite the laptop being old at the time, it Mint installed a broken intel graphics driver. It couldn't render anything without artifacts and was unusable. The fixed driver was older than the release of Mint I was using. Why didn't Mint install an up to date driver?
I wanted use my steam controller to control mouse and keyboard input exactly like you can on any windows machine. In Linux, it required you to hand edit some config files to allow Steam to even communicate with it's own controller. Like what the fuck? Why?
I wanted to dual boot Windows to play more steam games (this was before proton) but if you want to dual boot Linux and Windows, you have to install windows FIRST. Otherwise you have to be an expert in x86-64 boot semantics to do the configuration required. So this was impossible without reinstalling everything.
So fine, I decided to just install Windows on it. Windows pulled the license details out of the BIOS from the previous owner (whoops) and auto-registered itself, and had the fixed intel graphics driver from the get go. I installed steam and the steam controller worked as expected. Battery life was SIGNIFICANTLY better.
Not going to lie, Mint is a buggy POS and the fact anyone recommends it at all is a travesty. It's so bad it makes me think it's sponsored by Microsoft to sabotage new users.
Mint basically takes a years old Ubuntu, then an even older fork of a DE, uses an abandoned protocol then rolls it together and adds even more bugs to it. It's honestly one of the worst distros that exists.
Ubuntu, Fedora and (open)Suse are the only ones worth using if you want a smooth experience (ie. the corporate ones).
Edit - also needing to install Windows first to dual boot is a result of Windows installation wiping existing bootloaders.
Funny you should say that. I just tried to install some recent Linux distro on my Thinkpad two days ago. Fedora 42 wouldn't even install because apparently the installer doesn't support boot partition located past the 2Tb boundary, and that laptop has a 4Tb SSD with the first 2Tb used up by Windows. The error was completely incomprehensible, though.
Mint, OTOH, installed just fine and is working great.
