i've been using linux for over a decade and had none of these problems on 5 machines that i'd installed it on

It really depends on the driver lottery. Do you have good driver support? Good, you'll have a mostly flawless experience. Generic drivers? You either get weird cpu usage patterns, or perfectly normal behavior. Maybe an update will break everything. Welcome to the Linux Driver Lottery.

It's really good nowadays, but the issues remain the same sadly, and it's not Linux devs fault either, it's just the manufacturer lack of support.