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Wifi works most of the time out of the box, for many years now. That was different two decades ago, but that's a long time.

But if it does not work that is highly annoying of course.

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Ah I think what is happening is that a brand new laptop may not have had its drivers added to the latest download/image version of your chosen distro. Hence the need to connect and update to get those drivers.

For me, it was a ThinkPad X1 Gen 11 and Mint 21.2 (MATE) about a year ago.

Yeah, absolutely. And with very new hardware it absolutely depends on the distro as well, how new the kernel is.

> Linux Mint 21.2 features a Linux kernel 5.15 and an Ubuntu Jammy package base.

That's from Oct. 2021, so it wasn't new a year ago.

Ah indeed - actually 2 years ago. I believe 21.2 (Victoria) was released in 2023:

https://tuxcare.com/blog/is-linux-mint-based-on-ubuntu/

Doesn't time fly!

That is just plainly not true with USB WiFi adapters because the vendors constantly switch chipsets, and not all of them have good (or any) support.

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