No surprise there. Some wifi hardware is supported out of the box and will just work. That is not the problem. The pain starts when something does not just work.
>What computer did you have these problems with, where you needed to install a new kernel module?
Given that I am a major nerd I have multiple ones and admin even more ones. I think that particular episode happened with an Asus Eee Box B202 and an older version of Ubuntu.
> but OSX/iOS use a package manager.
I do not use anything Apple but if I recall correctly OS X uses self-contained .app bundles i.e. the apps usually include all their dependencies except those present on a particular OS X version by default. It is the "dependency management" done by Linux package managers which I hate. Namely that every app becomes a tangled web of dependencies with unlimited potential for pain. Apps should be self-contained, the OS should be a stable, well-defined platform to run them. I.e. "requires Window XP or newer" or "requires Mac OS X 10.6 or newer" is okay, "requires [long list of packages]" is not. That model will cause problems sooner or later. "I updated X and suddenly Y no longer works" etc.
As a programmer I find the concept of simply automatically updating libfoo 2.1.x to libfoo 2.1.y because "the developers say it does not break compatibility" scary. Software is written by people, developers accidentally break compatibility all the time, or write software which depends on buggy behavior, behavior which later gets fixed by other developers, thus breaking said software. Thus all common Linux package managers are themselves broken by design. They are only acceptable if you accept that occasionally some things will just stop working after a system update.
>Do you enjoy manually updating software one app at a time?
I do not often have to update any software and when I do it I can usually try the new version without uninstalling the old one easily and I know that its installation will not affect any other apps on my system. Yes, I enjoy that.
>the times a regular user needs to do that are becoming few and very far between.
No disagreement there, but as I said, personally I am not willing to put up with an OS where this happens, no matter how rarely it happens - unless I have to.