So you are you judging all Linux Distros by one of them that have been going downhill for some time? What company preinstalled Ubuntu for you?
No, actually, I didn't specify which Distro. The problem with the Bay Trail Atom freezing, and the AMD Ryzen APU freezing up, were both Linux Mint. The laptop (years earlier) with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, was pre-installed and sold by Acer. (Not a third-party seller.)
That was probably their beginning and end of selling "Linux on the Desktop" PCs.
Edit: Fun fact - the world needs more than just pure idealism to operate, apparently. Who in the family wants the responsibility to "Clean the soap dish".
Edit: Don't get me wrong, Linux Mint (one of several), is pretty darn usable,
if you luck out and your hardware, including your wifi card, is fully-supported.
I have an Acer Cloudbook running Mint. Until I upgraded to 18.3, it froze regularly after a few days of uptime, and got hot. But I also, every time I booted, I had to edit the kernel boot params, and add "NOAPIC" to it, for some reason, it couldn't detect that aspect of the hardware on it's own.
Once I finally upgraded to, I'm not sure at this point, Mint 19.1 I think, that "NOAPIC" issue went away, and now I can boot and restart, without major issues requiring manual intervention.
But this took, like ... more than a year of waiting on that hardware, struggling along, TRYING HARD to "make Linux work with it".
Edit: Now I'm living in fear of upgrading it any further, as, like my Acer 1007U laptop before it, an updated distro or kernel might make it completely unusable, as the kernel authors deprecate hardware support for iGPUs more than 3 or maybe it was 5 years old, when it took maybe 2-3 years before Linux was even usable on that device in the first place!