Sometimes it’s an ideological issue. Some distributions don’t ship nonfree drivers, some do, but require you to manually install them, and some have trouble making up their mind. This last is where you get live cds that automatically load the drivers needed for your hardware, but when you actually install, things aren’t working anymore.

here’s an example using my wifi card on my laptop; here i use lscpi and i’ve copy/pasted the stanza that pertains to the wifi card:

me@laptop:~$ lspci -v
[REMOVED]
00:14.3 Network controller: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-P PCH CNVi WiFi (rev 01)
        DeviceName: Onboard - Ethernet
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Dual Band Wi-Fi 6(802.11ax) AX201 160MHz 2x2 [Harrison Peak]
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16, IOMMU group 9
        Memory at 601d18c000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
        Capabilities: <access denied>
        Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi
        Kernel modules: iwlwifi
[REMOVED]

i can see that the driver name is iwlwifi and i can use that to look for related modules using lsmod:

me@laptop:~$ lsmod | grep iwlwifi
iwlwifi               598016  1 iwlmvm
cfg80211             1318912  3 iwlmvm,iwlwifi,mac80211

now i know all of the module names and i can either google them to learn how to install them or i can continue further with the package manager on the installation to further backwards engineer it. (googling is faster).

as i mentioned earlier there are caveats: downstream distros tend to use a slightly older version of their base distros so you also need to make sure that you’re using the same version of the driver and kernel and adjust accordingly if it doesn’t start working right away.