Every driver I have installed on Linux has been through a package manager and has been almost entirely automated.
so you have yet to know the joy of owning a new (i.e. not 17 year old) piece of hardware.
Here's how it worked for me recently when I bought a new human interface device:
1: Attach to the computer with USB.
2: Go online to look for a driver.
3: Wiggle input device while I wait for google to load up my first page of results.
4: Device already works. Close browser. Open beer.
Or another story, when I recently installed a new graphics card:
1: Turn off computer, open, place card in PCI-E slot.
2: Attempt to plug card into power supply, discover power supply doesn't have right number of connectors free.
3: Juggle plugs until everything is plugged in properly.
4: Close case back up, push power button.
5: Boots normally, uses open radeon driver, runs primary monitor at native resolution.
5a: shrug, say that's good enough for now, go off and do some light tasks, blendering, freespacing, get passable framerates.
5b: three days later, decide to try official binary blobs.
6: Go to website, download driver package, follow instructions linked at wiki and run downloaded executable with "--buildpkg Distro/version" flag.
7: Install resulting package files. Restart X. Everything works. Open beverage.
TL;DR: Leave your outdated nitpicking in the past where it belongs, please, Bobb.
