This could be shorted to if your device has no driver it wont work which is obviously true.

What I tried to tell is that if you have to rely on community driver projects, don't expect fun times, at least not when it comes to Realtek in my recent experience.

If you have very recent hardware and you find it doesn't work out of the box on stable options the easiest thing to do is install a more recent kernel.

I already had the latest available kernel at the time, as in: the very latest officially released kernel by kernel.org. Ubuntu was just a last-ditch effort as it will sometimes have drivers included that other distros might not have, normally I wouldn't touch it with a ten-feet pole and go either Arch or Manjaro. The driver simply wasn't included in the kernel. How do I know? Because I stumbled upon some discussions that mentioned the lack of support and 3 kernel releases later support for my card was specifically mentioned in the changelog.

Respectfully if DKMS wasn't automatically kicking in then you configured it incorrectly. It's a lot easier to just rely on a package that sets this up for you properly.

Yes, like a Realtek-XXXX-dkms package, which simply didn't work. I've configured stuff for DKMS before, scripting stuff for Linux is part of my daily workload, so yeah, you don't need to tell me scripting beats doing stuff manually.

The fact that getting an f*cking wifi card to work takes this much effort is what I meant with 'not fun times' and for me validates the meme, anecdotal as it might be.

Resorting to other distros, configuring additional repos so you can install a different kernel version, having to try different community projects to see which gives you a working driver, having to deal with getting DKMS to work, this is all stuff which hampers Linux adoptment. And without more adoptment we won't have to expect more support from manufacturers for desktop related consumer hardware. So yeah, that does make me cry a bit. It's a catch-22 unfortunately.