[comex]

“Generic computers” were never a thing. For decades, every computer shipped with Windows, the drivers were for Windows, the hardware was only tested on Windows, and to make it work, Linux would usually have to pretend to be Windows (e.g. when evaluating ACPI). Except for Macs, which were the same but with macOS. Most hardware was not documented. If Linux support existed, it was thanks to the work of reverse engineers; it often didn’t exist. If you bought a random laptop, you could expect some of the hardware to be unsupported.

These days… I’d say things aren’t all that different. On one hand, Linux has better hardware support overall, and Dell and some smaller manufacturers are offering Linux laptops. On the other, a lot of hardware still doesn’t work, or doesn’t work well. Some laptops have been getting more custom hardware, including Apple’s and others, and Linux has fallen behind a bit in supporting it. But it’s nothing new for Linux to take time to support new hardware.