Laptop hardware is always the toughest to support. For various reasons, laptops just have way more custom hardware in them, while desktops are all pretty much the same. And unless those laptops go out of their way to support Linux (or happen to be popular with Linux users), it's fairly common to have some kind of issue. Hackintosh has the same problem naturally.

I know no one likes hearing about Arch, but I have had far less hardware issues with Arch than Ubuntu, I think because Arch has newer packages/drivers. But it's an ongoing problem for Linux, unless you use a laptop that's well supported (from memory, mostly Thinkpads and Dell Inspirons).