Better game support? Better application support? I mean there's a good number of software packages that outperform their free alternatives, if those exist at all. Running them with WINE probably doesn't work correctly all the time either.
Wine is actually pretty good these days, but game support is still better on XP. I would also try
PlayOnLinux, which is basically Wine with profiles and a better interface.
With that said, if you just need to browse the web and perform general office and social media stuff you'll be fine on any well-supported distro.
Also most modern Linux distributions don't even work on most XP machines since they often compile their kernels expecting certain CPU extensions that were added in 2008+
False. The linux-generic kernel package is what generally ships with the majority of distros today, and it is
guaranteed to run on any i686 or newer CPU. Keep in mind that i686 was the Pentium 3/Athlon generation and has been around since the late 90's.
as well as good video driver support tending to be at least GTX2xx or HD5xxx...
Again, this is false. I run well-supported distros like Mint, Elementary, etc. on a variety of hardware (newer and older) running a variety of GPUs. Everything from an on-board nVidia 6150SE to my XFX HD5850 has been supported out-of-the-box since I can remember. When I was rocking a Geforce FX5200 years ago that was supported too.
The only GPU-related issue I have had in the last five years or so was with Elementary, specifically getting a dual monitor setup to work on the HD5850 in my production rig. Elementary is still in development and currently lacks any kind of GUI for fixing this. I had to write a bash script that ran XRandR and placed the desktop manually every boot to resolve it.
If you want to install proprietary drivers for a performance boost, it is now trivial to do that on most popular distros because jockey exists.
If you have a newer laptop with a hybrid GPU setup, I wouldn't run Linux on it. Driver support isn't there yet and the kernel doesn't handle them well.
and then there's the terrible window managers,
That is personal preference. I have used pretty much all of them, and I have personally found XFCE, MATE, Cinnamon, Openbox, LXDE, and KDE4/Plasma to all be pretty damn good.
compositors and the 'civil wars' between them
Yeah, uh, it wasn't really a war so much as "a few months of not knowing which one to pick." Compiz pretty much won way back in like 2008. You can move on with your life now.
XFCE4 comes with an excellent built-in compositor if you're running that DE.
An awful experience I remember having is a noticeable mouse lag with the wheel, and the only solution to 'fix' that was to have a 'realtime' kernel - which is zealously GPL to the point it doesn't allow non-Free driver blobs to work with its paravirtualization - which makes it useless for gaming.
Uh ... ok, then.
