I do have a vague recollection of having a lot of "fun" running Linux on an old laptop that for some reason had a PCMCIA WiFi card(I think the onboard one might have been dead or something? Or it was so damn old it never had one).

Harder times, sure. But also simpler, because at least the mainstream distros back then weren't so damn convoluted and it could never take me more than 30 seconds to change the DNS servers permanently. I set up NextDNS on my Pop OS laptop recently and it took me 2 hours of dicking around with systemd.

Starting to yearn back to Arch Linux again... At least with that I actually know what I'm running under the hood...