For years I was using a D-Link USB dongle with a Ralink chip to connect to my home network. At first I had to use a non-mainline driver but eventually mainline caught up. Anyway, either way, it worked pretty well without much fuss.

Then I moved to an apartment building with dozens of repeaters in it for a large university network, and my connection became unbearably slow (even though my laptop running Linux and my Android phone and tablet all worked fine) despite working OK on Windows.

So I ordered another dongle by a different manufacturer with a different chipset, which had many reviews exclaiming how well it worked on Linux. It had the same problems.

Eventually I got a PCIE Intel card and it worked splendidly, with no fiddling whatsoever.

The moral of the story is that there are a huge number of different hardware and software configurations and environments to use them in. And what's more, a configuration that works without issue in one environment can fail spectacularly in another.