Comment by bogwog

That's not accurate. Most hardware works out of the box with zero config on all the major distros. There are always some machines with unsupported hardware of course, but it's more the exception than the rule nowadays. This is especially true if your hardware is at least a year old.

I would say that "Generally", it's not a thing you need to worry about. If something isn't working, it's probably a configuration issue on your side. The easiest way to avoid that is to pick an immutable distro like Fedora Silverblue, Suse MicroOS, and soon Ubuntu Core Desktop. Combine that with Flatpaks, and you pretty much never have to touch a terminal or worry about a broken system.