it’s a lot better now to the point you don’t even need to search for drivers. I can’t even recall the last time I had to search for drivers on Linux, it just has them and some people have even made drivers for the most obscure things that not even windows supports anymore. Hell a couple months ago I found a driver someone made for something called a “Dex Drive” which was an old dongle for Playstation Memory cards.

Linux is 10x easier today. Even running windows programs is a hell of a lot easier and in many cases work the exact same way as on Windows. double click the exe, install it, you’re good to go.

I have had to do it one or two years ago for my previous installation, but that’s because I was using Debian on a computer whose WiFi card does not have open source drivers. But in Ubuntu it worked out of the box, and I think it may work out of the box on Debian too now that they include non free firmware by default.

You only need to install special drivers manually if you use a distro that is a bit “advanced”.

WiFi cards were an iconic problem many years ago.

Nowadays I almost never have issues with WiFi

The only wifi that doesn’t work out of the box these days is broadcom cards.

Unless you’re buying the ultra latest laptop of market the chances of that happening should be small. It happened to me once on an MSI 5 years ago where the WiFi driver had a bug and the fix was still on a repo out of tree. Other than that in 15 years of Linux never had an issue