2004 was round about the last time I had a major driver issue. I remember it well: it was WiFi drivers and I had to load Windows drivers via some compatibility layer, the name which escapes me. Weirdly FreeBSD worked just fine with any WiFi radio I threw at it.
Bluetooth never worked until recently either but I’ve never wanted to use Bluetooth on a laptop until wireless earphones were the norm so never missed BT functionality.
I rarely game on Linux but never had an issue with graphics card drivers. I will admit that I’ve been exceptionally lucky in that regard though, because radios and graphics do seem to be the rough edges.
These days with everything going USB, support in Linux has become child’s play. If a device presents itself as a USB standard rather than a proprietary protocol operating over USB, then Linux will handle it with ease.
So basically 2004 isnt unrealistic. I’m sure if I were to buy hardware that was tested to run on Linux (much like macOS users have to) then I’d not have had even the WiFi and BT issues.
edit:
just to add, I'd been running Linux since the 90s. I remember having to recompile the kernel if you wanted a new driver. I remember the migration to ELF. I used to love Windows 2000 and that was my daily driver but XP pre-service pack 2 sucked bad. It had double the memory and CPU footprint of 2000, and (in my opinion at least) had worse defaults. So it was XP that pushed me to run Linux as my primary daily driver. First with Slackware on a PC. But then when I got a laptop at around 2004 -- bought because I started getting DJ bookings with Ableton Live -- I tried various Linux distros before landing on SuSE (a vastly underrated platform!) and SuSE was rock solid for me for years.
Bluetooth never worked until recently either but I’ve never wanted to use Bluetooth on a laptop until wireless earphones were the norm so never missed BT functionality.
I rarely game on Linux but never had an issue with graphics card drivers. I will admit that I’ve been exceptionally lucky in that regard though, because radios and graphics do seem to be the rough edges.
These days with everything going USB, support in Linux has become child’s play. If a device presents itself as a USB standard rather than a proprietary protocol operating over USB, then Linux will handle it with ease.
So basically 2004 isnt unrealistic. I’m sure if I were to buy hardware that was tested to run on Linux (much like macOS users have to) then I’d not have had even the WiFi and BT issues.
edit:
just to add, I'd been running Linux since the 90s. I remember having to recompile the kernel if you wanted a new driver. I remember the migration to ELF. I used to love Windows 2000 and that was my daily driver but XP pre-service pack 2 sucked bad. It had double the memory and CPU footprint of 2000, and (in my opinion at least) had worse defaults. So it was XP that pushed me to run Linux as my primary daily driver. First with Slackware on a PC. But then when I got a laptop at around 2004 -- bought because I started getting DJ bookings with Ableton Live -- I tried various Linux distros before landing on SuSE (a vastly underrated platform!) and SuSE was rock solid for me for years.