"Avoid the pain of Windows 8" And say hello to the pain of not finding suitable drivers for half your devices.
I literally can't remember the last time I had driver issues in Ubuntu. The last time I had one in Linux at ALL was early Raspberry Pi builds that didn't include Broadcom drivers. And even that was easy to fix.
When it comes to laptops number one becomes the wireless card.
I usually avoid video issues by making sure the computer has an nvidia card or laptop has an nvidia chipset- learned my lesson there.