I bought a media center pc around 2000 and installed Ubuntu. The only thing that didn't work out of the box was sound through HDMI. Figured it out the same day.

It was kinda funny, when I installed fedora a few months ago, the wired ethernet port wasn't working at first (needed an update, probably because my mobo was pretty new) but the wifi worked right away. Not sure what I would have done if neither of them worked tbh.

impossible! jkjk

The only "real" computer (that is, a non-SBC one) I've installed Linux lately on was a work laptop. Touchpad, GPU and Wi-Fi worked straight off in Debian. Though I think it only installed Nouveau, never bothered with the real Nvidia driver. And it had some weird thermal regulation issues. Once it somehow left the filesystem in "plz boot in single user and fsck with a toothpick" state. The day before my internship ended, the thing crashed hard for some reason and took the filesystem with it. (Never use btrfs I guess?)

It's like magic.

If anything, Windows 11 is the OS where things don't work off of a fresh install (assuming it's a self-built PC). It requires an internet connection during regular setup yet the ethernet/wifi drivers simply didn't work. I had to cheat startup and install drivers through USB.

Bazzite on the other hand, worked instantly. The only thing needed was to set the right sound output.