I think it very depends on your hardware. I, personally, never had problems with it, on thinkpad which I use right now WiFi drivers were out of box even in Gentoo minimal ISO(It uses iwlwifi). But, every hardware that I have is about 10yo. And I think I haven’t any non-intel WiFi-cards.
But also one of my friends had to compile drivers for his card manually from github, and second friend had issues with his WiFi constantly disconnecting which we couldn’t solve.
That might also be a general network drivers vs. kernel version problem as well. I’ve had that on some Ubuntu falvors on various cards, it isn’t specific to just wi-fi, it happened on lan as well (just disconnects for a few ms and then connects again).
And yeah, one of the many reasons why I usually buy second hand hardware as well. One, it’s a lot cheaper, two, drivers for Linux are usually not a problem 😁.
I haven’t had any recent issue with those either. Just make sure both the nvidia driver and the kernel are from your distros repository, and you always update them both at the same time.
My new laptop has a nvidia card in it. One time it stopped working after a update so I downgraded the drivers so I can wait entail the next update they do work. Besides that it have worked great. I am on fedora so rpmfusion is where the drivers are from.
It’s been so much better…but I’m steeling myself to track down a WiFi direct bug that keeps disconnecting due to a timeout after 10 seconds. Linus give me strength!
This was true maybe 10 years ago, nowadays Linux has better driver support than Windows. Printers, networking, input devices, everything I’ve tried is plug n play with Linux, Windows you gotta driver hunt.
If you want some irony, on a recent Ubuntu install I was able to access WiFi out of the box but the small windoze dual boot partition refused to connect to a WiFi 6 router. Tried upgrading driver, downgrading drivers, nothing… The computer came shipped with windows 10.
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