Today at the grocery store a sweet older lady approached me and asked if I knew anything about computers. I said yes I do, and she produced a mouse saying that her son set up Linux mint for her and she was wondering if the mouse was compatible. It needed kernel version 2.6 or newer so I said that the mouse should work, guessing mint itself was probably newer than that kernel. Happy with my answer, we chatted a little, then she thanked me and left.
It was a nice experience, so I thought I should share!
My experience is still a good success rate there. Back in ~2015 my family got an USB WiFi card which needed an out-of-tree module, which the manufacturer had on Github, complete with DKMS instructions. It was upstreamed after about a year, though!
The only completely unsupported device I’ve had is my laptop’s fingerprint sensor.
You won’t be having such a good experience with a Broadcom Wi-Fi chip. Broadcom and NVIDIA have nothing but contempt for the Linux community.
Except if it’s for their own gain