Requiring new kernels for hardware support is a permanent problem with the way linux is developed. Ubuntu was supposed to "solve" this with it's hardware suppor

Requiring new kernels for hardware support is a permanent problem with the way linux is developed. Ubuntu was supposed to "solve" this with it's hardware support layer( basically backporting drivers) but I don't know how well that works. Fwiw with an older amd gpu that got mainline support years after it's release I found that Fedora was a good balance for getting the new patches without breaking everything.