I don’t think you’re right on this. When DELL is branding a laptop as “linux supported”, then the hardware normally works out of the box with at the very least, Ubuntu (and probably by most other distros too). If you’re seeing hardware incompatibilities, it’s probably because the Linux kernel itself might have dropped some of the older hardware drivers from its list of support. I’m writing this on a DELL Latitude 5480 from 2017, and I have installed the latest ubuntu without any hardware issue whatsoever. Everything’s just supported out of the box. No special image from DELL was ever required. So if you’re seeing your hardware stop working, you should look if DELL provided closed source drivers or firmware for your laptop’s hardware. If that’s the case, then you didn’t have a “linux supported” laptop, you had a laptop with specifically-added Linux support after the fact. I wouldn’t have bought that in the first place.