> nice to see that this curse still occasionally persists /s

FTFY

Seriously, though, that's a huge outlier. I haven't touched a machine in the last 10 years where Ethernet and Wifi were not supported out-of-the-box. (Including my new Thinkpad, which I was weary about since it came with an Atheros Wifi module, but it too worked out-of-the-box without any tinkering).

These days, the biggest issues are with Nvidia GPUs from what I've heard.