I remember getting PCI based Winmodems working on my old machines back in the late 90s/early 2000s. A lot of people bought ISA modems or physical COM port model

I remember getting PCI based Winmodems working on my old machines back in the late 90s/early 2000s. A lot of people bought ISA modems or physical COM port models so they wouldn't have to deal with that bullshit. Now most Linux distributions are littered with binary blobs in linux-firmware that have to be loaded for everything from Wi-Fi to Bluetooth. We've gone the total opposite direction of where we should be .. except for like .. amdgpu.