Am sorry, but what? Who searches for drivers on Linux? I’ve been a user for decades now

The last time I gave Linux a serious go on the desktop, I had an ISA Sound Blaster card that supported PnP. Under Windows, it was automatically detected and would at least play sound out of the box, without installing any additional drivers and had a few special features that you had to install SB drivers to make work. Under Linux, in order to get any sound at all, I had to dig around online to find out that you needed to download a driver package, install it, then run a tool from a shell that would generate a config file for the driver with every configuration the card might possibly have, then manually edit that config to tell it which config you actually had, then restart the driver and then you'd get actual sound out of it.

I don't doubt it's drastically improved since then, but it's always made me a bit gunshy about trying it again.

Nobody. It either works out of the box or you're out of luck. Windows has worse problems, actually. Try using hardware from 2000 and earlier from manufacturers who are out of business. Chances are, it will just work right away linux, but on windows, even if you manage to find the drivers, they are most likely built for 32-bit XP or something and won't ever work on modern versions.