A lot of your "problems" are because you've spent years buying "Windows" devices indiscriminately. If you had been buying things that were known to be compatibl

A lot of your "problems" are because you've spent years buying "Windows" devices indiscriminately. If you had been buying things that were known to be compatible with Linux, you'd have no problems getting them to work. You didn't state which distro or package manager you were dealing with but there is a LOT more third-party support for DEB packages than the others, so that may also be why you had problems.