The good news is this isn’t an issue for most people, it was free, and your device was already doing so poorly with Windows you felt it was at the end of its life, so even not working perfectly it still worked.

Edit: Also, Linux isn’t one thing. Your distro may not have included the packages to make those devices work, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. You could have searched for a solution, or perhaps a different distro would work.