The problem you are describing is at once intractable and a solved problem. Most oems are at best ambivalent about Linux support. If you are lucky they provide enough documentation for volunteer labor to support their hardware otherwise someone has to for free spend their time reverse engineering their pile o' hacks.
Since there isn't an inexhaustible well of free labor to throw at other peoples hardware there will always be some hardware that either doesn't work right or doesn't work right out of the box because it requires fix foo that is only available in version bar that is the very latest that hasn't made its way into the stable version yet. If you run a bleeding edge distro you may find that you have the needed version of bar but they broke something else!
The solution is to buy hardware with the OS you intend to run in mind. If you are just curious about whether linux might be useful to you the easiest thing in the world to do is try it out either via live usb or virtual machine. If indeed you would like to run linux and it doesn't work with your existing hardware just buy with Linux in mind when you get your next machine.
Instead of asking whether linux can meet the impossible standard of running flawlessly on any pos you happen to throw at it ask whether there exists a reasonable range of hardware that meets your needs and expectations.
If you approach it that way you will most likely be satisfied.
That's basically my approach; when I want to run Linux (because the applications that run in Linux are useful for a wide range of things, and I'm very used to the command line), I tend to run it in a VM alongside / atop the Windows or OSX install that the hardware I'm using boots to.
The exception I regularly hit is raspberry pi, but in that specific case I (a) don't actually expect anything to really "just work" out of the box (the whole point of the platform is to hack around on it) and (b) I'm not trying to use it as my primary development / work / games / day-to-day environment.
Since there isn't an inexhaustible well of free labor to throw at other peoples hardware there will always be some hardware that either doesn't work right or doesn't work right out of the box because it requires fix foo that is only available in version bar that is the very latest that hasn't made its way into the stable version yet. If you run a bleeding edge distro you may find that you have the needed version of bar but they broke something else!
The solution is to buy hardware with the OS you intend to run in mind. If you are just curious about whether linux might be useful to you the easiest thing in the world to do is try it out either via live usb or virtual machine. If indeed you would like to run linux and it doesn't work with your existing hardware just buy with Linux in mind when you get your next machine.
Instead of asking whether linux can meet the impossible standard of running flawlessly on any pos you happen to throw at it ask whether there exists a reasonable range of hardware that meets your needs and expectations.
If you approach it that way you will most likely be satisfied.