If the card supports at least WPA2, it should support WPA2 Enterprise as well. Only cards manufactured in the last few years support WPA3. I doubt they would enforce WPA3 only.
The proprietary stuff is shipped as “firmware” (even though that’s not always the case) allongside the distro’s kernel. My best guess is that some distro out there (Ubuntu most probably) has obtained permission from a bunch of manufacturers to ship this “firmware” allongside it’s kernel. The rest of the distro’s are just riding this train, repackaging the firmware packages (if they can do it and redistribute it, why can’t we 🤷).
I might be mistaken, but this is the only thing that makes sense to me. Maybe it’s a semi-coordinated joint effor as well, like someone obtains permission to share firmware, writes to a bunch of maintainers and devs that “this and this” binary blob is free for redistribution and it gets picked up by most popular distros out there.
Trust me, it is. There is some obscure hardware out there. Plus, a lot of us still use hardware that was late XP time released and ndiswrapper was still around. So, for some of these cards, there is still no drivers for Linux (or buggy/unstable ones).
Laugh all you like, it’s reality over here. There is vote snatching every election, dead people voting, abroad voters voting here (locally)… this is not the US 🤷.
They have a very very limited range. I have used them, but only if the AP is in the same room, otherwise, they crap out.
PS: Everything’s built from reinforced concrete and cinderblocks/bricks around here (seismically active region), so we have trouble with all sorts of wireless signals, including WiFi and 3/4G. 5G is out of the question here. We do have the towers, but less than 1% of users actually use them.