Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> the laptop doesn't sleep when closed Linux is amazing but doing the right thing when you close the lid is a seemingly intractable problem for it. Maybe we need a hardware spec and a paid distro to finally solve these kinds of problems.
Dell XPS is the only laptop where I have seen this working reliably. Worst part is that thanks to zram, many distros removed hibernate functionality. So its not possible now to either sleep or hibernate on many laptop/distro combinations. This makes Linux unusable in most cases due to battery drain (and some times even dangerous as laptop gets super hot inside bag etc).
That isn't to say that it's worked out of the box. When I install Linux on a laptop, I'll put some effort into making sure everything works as wanted and this might involve adding kernel flags or mucking with dbus, and it certainly involves some research. If you expect any open source OS to behave like a proprietary OS you bought a license for, you're likely to be disappointed. If you come in with the expectation of learning to solve problems for yourself you'll fare much better.