Earlier quoted context omitted.
I ran a debian-based distro on a Lenovo thinkpad in graduate school from 2008 to about 2011. I had basically the same experience. Everything worked 95% of the time, but that other 5% felt entirely random and pretty dehabilitating. Now I use a mix of Win, OS X, and Ubuntu depending on what I am trying to accomplish. I make heavy use of Linux servers, but have no inclination of using one as a primary end-user desktop e…
You should try. The changes happened in the last 5 years are extremly big. I mean, all my notebooks (some DELL and a lenovo t430) work better with any linux distro compared to win10, and I even get +30/40% hours of battery on them
Which distro's have you used on those notebooks? I'll likely be switching back to Linux laptop from Mac, and I'm trying to figure out which distro I want to use.