All I’m saying is that if your idea of driving a car is to sit on the engine compartment and pull levers and cables from there, you might have a different experience than most drivers.
It "works" with 2.4 with 1 antenna, but the speed is then capped at 150Mbps instead 600Mbps/1300Mbps the hardware is capable of.
So it's like buying an AWD car, but realizing only one wheel gets power. Still technically drivable, but hardly working well. Maybe most people wouldn't even notice at all, but I figured I was technical enough to get in the weeds and fix it. Not all cars end up being Toyotas, sometimes you get a Jaguar.
Desktop Linux is like a kit plane. You can pay to have someone assemble it for you, but you still need to know how to get in there and fix it.
But the advice is still very much to research the hardware or buy a prebuilt with vendor support.
Compared to a decade ago, more stuff just works; especially noticeable with graphics drivers. But when things hiccup, which they still do, it still requires quite a lot of tech savviness to solve.
I use Linux mint on my desktop. Wifi just works. I’m using some X870 motherboard.
I got the motherboard when it was really new, and I think it took a few months before wifi worked properly in mint out of the box. (I use Ethernet anyway so it wasn’t too upsetting). But after a few months, they had it all sorted. I have never manually compiled a kernel or wifi drivers or anything on this machine. I suspect most Linux users don’t do stuff like that any more.
Not to say it’s a trouble free experience. I’ve had problems with the nvidia drivers a few times recently. In the transition to nvidia’s new driver model, I’ve somehow ended up with incompatible nvidia packages on my system and the graphical environment broke. The most recent time I asked Claude code to take a look at my system and tell me what commands I should run to fix the nvidia packages. It did a great job.
It doesn’t feel like a kit plane any more. It’s a bit temperamental from time to time, but for the most part Linux just works.
The sharp edges are usually pointing the package manager at a repo (generally an official expansion) that lets you install the necessary binary.