I think it's improved, but I installed Debian on a laptop recently and the fresh system came up without wifi, which was bewildering because it connected to wifi during the install process. Took me a bunch of troubleshooting to find a rfkill setting buried in the system.
AI: you probably turned on airplane mode
me: I definitely didn't
So I love debian but it's still rough around the edges and I'm not sure I'd recommend non-technical people dive in.
This has been my exact Debian experience since I tried it on Debian 3.1. On every system at least one of network, sound, display, or power management just wouldn't work out of the box even if they did in the installer.
I ended up on Mint because I consistently found that Debian was willing to compromise their philosophy for the live distro installer, but they would never warn you that you were about to reboot into an air gapped system.
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