I bought a d-link usb wifi for $7. It worked fine on Linux.

USB Wi-Fi adapters are usually fine. I do have a PCI-E Wi-Fi card in my desktop from my Hackintosh days, though, which has gone unused since my home now has lots of ethernet connections.

I was thinking something on those lines the other day. We like to say that Linux revives old computers, and I wouldn’t for a second consider putting Windows back on them, but I also have a case of hardware support so close, yet so far. I’ve two old laptops with nvidia chips from before the days of Optimus switiching, so you are forced to use the dGPU. Believe me, I wasted a whole weekend trying to make them use only integrated graphics. It was fine while they were supported under the proprietary nvidia driver, but as soon as support ended, nouveau became the only option and it absolutely crippled 3D performance, even on very old titles. Meanwhile, Windows still supports the old 340 driver needed for those graphics chips.

Mostly comes down to hardware vendors not bothering with Linux support and open-source in general. Which leaves support for affected devices down to volunteers having time to reverse-engineer a driver from scratch. To be clear, I don’t blame nouveau at all. It must have been a ton of work to even get the nouveau driver to its current state.

support is expensive and a lot of hardware companies operate on razor thin margins.

either that or their c-levels of the hardware companies want to maximize profits.

wireless cards are really cheap on aliexpress and the ones I’ve bought have been actual genuine parts. I recommend getting something like a Intel AX210 for normal use, or a card supported by ath9k if you want to mess around with wifi stuff

Have you tried looking for the driver for your wireless card?