And this wouldn't have happened with Linux?

Nope. Because Realtek commit their drivers directly to the Linux kernel, they may be a bit slower getting the driver to the consumer depending on their internal team that's developing/handling the driver and how long the code review takes on the kernel maintainer side but even then you can generally get the driver early e.g. before it's merged into the kernel via a dkms a.k.a out-of-tree driver (easily found in something like the AUR). Once the Realtek WiFi driver is merged you don't have to worry about it because it'll be in every distro with the following kernel release.