i recently spent 4 hours installing random driver versions to get wifi working on a windows pc, i'm of the opinion wifi is just for phones at this point

RTW8852 based wifi, sure. You can get Linux preinstalled, and with full support from some places. I highly recommend doing that if you're going to run Linux. They'll not have that chip though. They'll have one that works.

That's odd. My 2018 Lenovo Thinkpad had working Wifi out of the box from day 1.

The last time I had wifi driver issues on Linux was 2008.

Does it mean rtw8852 is supported on *BSD?

mostly, I can’t make both my usb wifi5 dongles work on ubuntu 22 as well as random Qualcomm wifi4 pcie. These chips must be decade old.