Linux Hardware

The Linux hardware for a desktop computer that works best is from my experience an INTEL-CPU, with if you need great graphics, a NVIDIA card.
The NVIDIA card in turn requires a closed source driver, that is a common problem solved easily.
There are also drivers for ATI graphics cards that work pretty well these days, but they have a history of not being quite as good as NVIDIA.

Using a laptop with linux may not be the same story. Especially it is the wireless controllers that may need an extra driver that is vendor specific, it is not open source, the same case as with the NVIDIA or ATI driver.
In some rare cases with for example older toshiba laptops, the bios may not be programmed in a standardized way, which leads to that they work with windows, but they are sub optimized, so that they do not really conform to BIOS standards.

Over all it is possible to get the wireless controllers to work, you just need to install it manually in some cases. Several Linux Distributions have included tools that show you what available vendor (non open source) software is available for your hardware, these includes Ubuntu and Linux Mint. One of those that don't do this automatically is Fedora, why this may be a better choice when you are a little more experienced with linux, or if you maybe want to learn more about it.

I have written tons of stuff about installing fedora so please have a look here, there are also some notes about linux mint. Try linux, you will be impressed i'm sure!