Microsoft has it the easiest, and the result has been mediocrity in reliability (largely on account of bottom-dollar driver authorship), even given its monopoly power in the OEM market. Clearly, "just" locking up the entire OEM market is not enough to Achieve Results. Hence, the signed-driver certification programs we're seeing in recent years, although I have no idea how effective they are.
Apple does a crapload of work to make sure that the one, tiny blessed subset of integrated hardware they select every so often works well during the span of its useful life. Sure, they lean on driver authors of suppliers pretty hard, something which few can do, but they are not nearly as hands-off as Microsoft: the buck stops with them, and a bad integration is Their Fault. And, on the flip side, if you are not an Apple supplier you don't give even two bits about supporting their operating system, for obvious reasons.
If there was a Dell distro and it Did Not Suck, I'd seriously consider it. I consider Ubuntu good-enough, so it could be Ubuntu but carefully tested and with divergent kernel and driver releases when appropriate.
> For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure the support for laptops is more dependable than the support for desktops, especially if you go for an unexciting configuration with Intel graphics etc.
Doubtful, having not long ago possessing such a laptop and sitting next to a colleague in the current-day who has kept with the faith, although with increased grousing. He was, of course, careful with his hardware purchase, buying an ostensibly well-supported Thinkpad. The monitor on his desk still sits unused.
There is so much more to go wrong in common use cases that are eliminated on a desktop (because you can't even do some of them, or wouldn't want to). Wireless chipsets, power management, suspension and hibernation, fiddly bits like special softkeys, hot plugging displays, you name it. The weakest link on the desktop side is the video card, and this has proven to be bad enough for me -- crashes have come and gone for me with each Ubuntu release on a pretty plain-jane NVIDIA card.