"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it."

Unless it's a (Microsoft-Only-vendor)-specific version of the card. Not that that's ever bit me with my Dell i8600 which had a broken vbios that I had to install Windows XP back on to apply the fix for. Aside from IIRC having slightly different PCI information and a different vbios, I don't know what the various vendor-specific "flavors" of the cards do.

The long-term solution is to stop buying hardware that's designed to only run Windows and tested *just* enough to pass WHQL and instead buy from a Linux vendor so that they can begin to get the ODMs to explicitly support Linux or at least stop producing hardware that breaks so badly.

Yes, your selection is going to be more limited. Does even Apple have the selection of Dell, Lenovo, Sony, HP, etc. put together? No. Instead, help the Linux vendors get a solid support base to begin to push back on the ODMs. You know, like how Apple can get their suppliers to produce hardware that Only Works with Apple. If the Linux vendors have enough customers, they begin to have the power to fix the Linux hardware situation. Until then, they or you have to pick and choose your hardware carefully and try to see if they can fix its brokenness (or work around its brokenness in software, s.a. System76's drivers).

The short-term bonus of buying from a Linux vendor is that they do the picking, choosing, and working around for you instead. So you win long and short-term at the cost of some selection.

I swear, the smartest thing Apple ever did was make OSX only run on Apple hardware. Otherwise, we’d be hearing about how OSX is crap on random Windows consumer hardware because sound is flaky and it can’t suspend and resume right (and sometimes it can’t even turn itself off!) while Apple tries to source hardware from the ODMs with a market share in the single thousands of customers. You know, like e.g. ZaReason and System76 are trying to do it.