Personally I haven’t. While Linux is imperfect, choosing the right distro makes the rest of the experience straightforward. And with it’s whole complexity, I find Linux more user friendly than Windows. Even driver issues, broken shadow file ownership and KDE specifics only made me more confident about my choice to use Linux after I solved everything.
I wasn’t sure how powerful of a machine you had. The Ryzen you have likely slaughters the CPUs in both of the laptops I mentioned; an i5 4300U in the HP, and an i5 3320m in the Thinkpad. I should’ve been more specific about that.
I have Debian 13 running on a desktop i5 4570 box, and it seems to run well, though I have it set up differently than the laptops since it’s a headless machine I mainly access over RDP and SSH. It also has twice the RAM (16GB vs the 8GB in both laptops), an NVME SSD for a boot drive, and XFCE instead of KDE Plasma.
Whatever the case, I feel like if your machine is powerful enough, the performance difference between Debian and more aggressively optimized distros shouldn’t matter too much, BUT, I can see not wanting to use it if you’re adamant about squeezing every last drop of performance from your machine.