In the past 5+ years I've not had to install a single driver _except_ one nvidia driver on one of the machines I wanted to game on. And that was not necessary except for gaming.
Lately, it's just pretty much "install Debian from .ISO" -> done.
By the time I've installed everything I want, I bet I've spent less time getting Arch set up than the Windows install that comes with my computer (tracking down software on Windows sucks, on Arch pacman gets it done quickly).
If you're using Nvidia, most distributions (except Free Software zealots like Debian and Fedora) include their proprietary driver in the repositories, and honestly nouveau is quite good for most things. If you have the choice, go for AMD cards and they'll work much better out of the box.
It's really luck of the draw, you may get a machine that has a device without good driver support, but it seems increasingly rare. Some ThinkPads now officially support Linux and Dell has been producing the XPS 13 Developer Edition for years which ships with linux and is supported by Dell.