It's very hardware-specific so it's impossible to generalize, but usually stuff will either work out of the box or not work at all on free systems (Linux, BSD).

It's very hardware-specific so it's impossible to generalize, but usually stuff will either work out of the box or not work at all on free systems (Linux, BSD). The exception is if your distro refuses to ship with proprietary software (good!) in which case you need to install extra drivers (eg. firmware-linux) for stuff to work. Something to consider is how old the hardware is. Typically, drivers will land in Linux kernel 1-2 years after hardware is released, so you need to use slightly older hardware and/or a distro which keeps up to date on a rolling-release basis. For example, good luck finding 802.11ax hardware supported by free systems right now: 802.11ac on the other hand (spec from 2013) works perfectly for 90% of chipsets. To be clear if you're not familiar with driver development: this is 100% the fault of crappy hardware manufacturers who are doing everything except their job. Their job is to produce hardware and publish datasheets for them: problem is due to corporate/copyright culture and abuse of dominant position from Microsoft since 90s (see IBM/Microsoft scandals and the threats to dismantle Microsoft), they stopped to publish datasheets and instead publish a crappy windows driver that's full of bugs and will stop working with new releases. We should not be supporting these vampires with our money but hey the problem is the hardware vendors who do distribute their datasheets can be counted on our fingers and their hardware doesn't have the raw power of your latest NVINTELDIARM. Excellent usenix talk on this topic: https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-keynote https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-ke... Previous HN discussion on this topic, about Lenovo more precisely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28977175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28977175