dan, 1 year ago (edited 3 months ago)

The thing with drivers is that the hardware they’re written for doesn’t really change. A particular network card is always going to behave the same way. Once the driver works well, it’s pretty much complete, and the only changes that are needed are bug fixes, updates to handle new firmware, or adjustments if the kernel changes some implementation detail of how drivers are used. There could be months or years between updates to the driver.

Some manufacturers have great first-party Linux support. Intel is a good example - they contribute a lot of code to the kernel, and their drivers are maintained by employees.