The best path forward is that developers make their linux drivers before they release their hardware to the market. You know, like what they do for windows.

There's no silver bullet here. You have to wait for someone to reverse engineer the drivers if the developers of the hardware don't care enough to supply even basic linux driver support. Either that or linux becomes so popular that it becomes senseless to ignore it (let's be real though, MacOS is popular enough for this to be true and yet there's still new hardware made that ignores that platform too.)

Not be an Arch Linux shill, I don't use it (albeit a distro that is based on it), but try Arch or some other rolling release distro. There is a reason why Valve switched steamOS to Arch from Debian. Also, quit buying new shiny stuff, you a**hole? We get jealous over here 😂

It's a chicken and egg problem; manufacturers aren't going to care to upstream drivers if not enough of their users are on Linux, which slows new hardware. It's much better than it was, but still ongoing.

Amd's 7000 series amdgpu driver was busted in several ways for like a year post launch, and is still missing tunables for many GPU features.

Manufacturers are capable of making out of tree and unfree modules, but honestly I prefer the slow progress if it means most driver work stays in-tree.

That brings me to my question, is there a future where this isn't the case? And what would be required to get there?

Some kind of service where vendors can shove their propietary hacks of drivers in your face (as DKMS), like on Windows.

But nobody wants that.

In the last decade, I've had that sort of issue affect me twice:

1. I bought an AMD Vega 56 on launch day, and I had to run it with the proprietary driver for a while.
2. I recently upgraded my three monitors, and was having trouble getting them all to do the 1440p/100Hz they were rated for. After a bunch of fiddling with xrandr etc. and trying to add modelines and whatnot, it turned out the real problem was that I needed to upgrade from HDMI cables to DisplayPort ones.

Anyway, I guess the gist is that I wouldn't have expected Windows to do any better in either case.

Honestly if you want the best chance of brand new hardware working, a rolling release distro running the newest release kernel as soon as possible is pretty much your best bet.

Believe me, it used to be so much worse than that.

Hardware vendors see the need to allocate their resources to support the majority of the users, so that means making drivers for all current flavors of Windows and Mac. Linux has a residual market margin, so no incentive there.

It usually is up to some talented person or persons somewhere out there to come up with support for dinner shiny new hardware, usually months or years after the shininess went away.

The path is clear: buy from vendors who support Linux, make yourself heard if they don't, or put up the work to make it work if you have the capability.

is there a future where this isn’t the case? And what would be required to get there?

Hardware manufacturers of companies in a position of power who leverage it. Like Valve.

Are we just waiting for them to give a shit?

Speak with your money. They won't care though, the linux market is minimal.

the last time i was in your shoes, i bought from linux only shops. ie system76, tuxedo, kfocus, juno, novacustom, etc. and i had the exact opposite experience; it was as smooth as that of a mac owner, but on linux.

linux's forte is stability, that's why it's so dominant in the server space. adding in support for end user hardware is an accident and requires extra effort on hardware makers' part who don't always rise to the challenge when they don't believe it's profitable enough for the effort; in which case, volunteers have to step in to fill the gap.

i never regretted any of those purchases.

Bleeding edge is a bitch, ain't it. Thanks arch!

What you're asking is very difficult due to resources, creating new bugs etc. The reality is, go with true and trusted hardware. Linux can not possibly support every new shiny thing. That's Windows' job, because that's where the drivers are made for. And since it's difficult to install Linux drivers manually for most users, manufacturers don't bother with Linux at all. Especially, since Linus doesn't care about compatibility with older kernels as much as Windows does. Either support is in the kernel, or you'll experience problems.

Personally, all my laptops and PCs are more than 4 years old, for that reason. I often buy refurbished too. I write this in a refurbished Macbook Air from 2015, where I nuked MacOSX to run Linux Mint (with a binary broadcom wifi binary which is thankfully well supported by ubuntu). On my main PC, the only new thing I bought was an Intel gfx A- card, a 2 years old card, but I knew it had support before I bought it.

And even then, if it's some weird thing, e.g. some over-complicated sound capture device, gaming mouse with a thousand buttons, etc etc (in other words, non-standard hardware), don't expect great support for it, even if the years are passed. Stay with vanilla hardware to be compatible. If you had bought a 60 Hz 4k monitor, you wouldn't have had problems and you would have saved money. Personally, the only feature I look in monitors these days (apart from good color and enough ports), is that they are 32" instead of the usual 27", so that I don't have to use scaling (which creates yet another problem with Linux). I use 4k in its 100% resolution, fitting lots of windows in it, and not destroying my eyes because they're well visible.

When manfuacturers are making their new hardware they do the work of making sure whatever OS they want on it will work flawlessly. Most machines are not made with Linux in mind but the community comes in once released and does the work to get it working. If manufacturers did that work prior to release it would be fine. Companies do exist that specialize in Linux machines that do work like this.

One of the main reasons it takes so long for new stuff to get support is the linux devs doing that work themselves need access to the hardware to make it work. They arent made of money tho, and cant go buy every new piece of hardware as soon as it releases.

Its a matter of manufacturer support vs community support. Typically community support takes longer to get rolling but also lasts much longer. A combination of the 2 would be ideal, but manufacturers would have to cooperate.

I can't answer the main question, but anecdotally I find different distros work differently on different hardware. Like one laptop I have will not install, or if it does install it won't boot, any Debian based distro, but RPM based is fine. There is some bios bug or quirk that fails with deb, but rpm distros acknowledge and move on. So sometimes distro hopping can help.