Purchasing new hardware to run Linux on used to be so perilous that I would only buy hardware which was at least 6 months out of date. The ecosystem has changed dramatically such that when my Dell XPS experienced a chassis failure, I went to a big box store and came home with a Lenovo Slim 7. I immediately installed a Linux distribution on it and started setting up my new portable workstation without even considering hardware support.
Only after a couple weeks of usage did I notice how peaceful everything was. No notifications, no alerts, no sound of any form!
As desirable as some peace and quiet might be, I do need to hear things from my computer every now and again. I scurried off to diagnose the problem.
I use a simple terminal-based UI for managing sound on my machines pulsemixer, which was not
showing any sound cards attached to the machine. Searching for similar issues with this hardware, a search engine brought me to a Fedora-related thread where a particular package was referenced as having solved the problem: sof-firmware.
For well over a decade I have used openSUSE, the reasons are not relevant for this post, but Fedora-alikes and openSUSE are usually close enough in packages, naming, and ethos, that forum threads and discussions for one can apply to the other:
zypper in sof-firmware
Suddenly Slack was knocking down my door again, and I had sound! Ta-da! Of course I closed Slack, muted the sound, and went back to work.
Generally speaking Linux hardware support has gotten so good in the last decade that I forget the olden days when we had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to get a working set of desktop drivers.
Maybe next year will finally be the year..