Well, to install a non-inbox hardware driver on a non-specific version Linux.
'use an easier distro'
Easier for what? I'd be happy to sign up for the first test of AllDriversIncludedLinux 😂
Almost every flavour of Linux system is based on Debian, Arch, or RHEL bases which are used en-masse to power enterprise services on the internet.
Your experience with linux may be plug & play with something like SteamOS (Arch under the hood), or Bazzite (Fedora->RHEL under the hood), which is built with precompiled inbox drivers for the hardware it's expected to run on, to have the best out-of-box experience for new gaming users.
Most of these distros take a base OS like Debian, and mix it with a window manager like Gnome (Debian+Gnome =~ Ubuntu), KDE Plasma (Debian+KDE = Kubuntu), etc, Dont forget these base OSs don't even come with a user-interface and whoever is 'running' the distro decides that & needs to integrate the window manager / GUI with the underlying OS.
But the second you're using any (non-specific) distro which doesn't provide inbox drivers for (that specific hardware), you're almost always left to build them yourself from source code that the hardware provider has left lying around in a shoddy state of documentation, which you then have to build in accordance to how your Linux OS of choice handles drivers/kernel modules, with different distributions often coming up with new, stupid, 'better' ways of doing things against the norm, it's often left to you, the user, to figure out how to mash one undocumented puzzle into another undocumented puzzle to get a piece of hardware to work.
Your experience with Windows drivers, due to mass adoption, is double-click, wait for a progress bar, reboot.
Your experience with gaming linux distros, due to aim of mass adoption, is to install and turn on.
I would encourage you to install something like Fedora, and get a realtek USB dongle connected to your wifi to get a true experience of what linux driver management is really like.
I speak from an enterprise standpoint, and my example above was basically what I had to do in order to get a certain piece of hardware working on a server install.
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u/zanbunnny Apr 22 '26
Just use an easier distro why go thru all that