This was a common experience. Amazing (to me) that today all of the most popular distros have accomplished this, collecting and including all the drivers for al

This was a common experience. Amazing (to me) that today all of the most popular distros have accomplished this, collecting and including all the drivers for all (well, not all, most) of the myriad network interfaces used, so that tweaking for network access is now pretty much built-in to the install. Same is true for the many BSDs now. I had the same thing happen as you with Darwin (yae, I got it to install! But I can't do a thing with it). What I recall about linux in the 00's was that Microsoft would break some functionality in Windows environments, and linux would fix it within a few weeks. I saw that as the reason for linux's existence, subverting Microsoft control. I think it may be still true, but LAMP became a pretty good reason for linux, too.