Just set up linux on a machine recently with an Intel network chipset. Mint had no driver that supported it so I ended up having to build from source. I can't imagine trying to understand that process if one is not a developer
What I had hoped would happen during install was that the kernel would fall back to some simple driver, kinda like the simple VGA drivers, and then find the correct driver and install that.
Sadly there's no basic compatibility layer for NICs, except in so far as many small manufacturers emulate some specific well known NIC. Intel doesn't really do that, though. But they do tend to update the drivers in linux pretty quickly themselves, which is what makes them attractive for linux use.
FYI mint sucks with these things. Badly. Their driver support seems more random than anything. That said i am pretty sure i remember some kind of bloat kernel in their repos which ships with all the relevant stuff.
There's an official ubuntu mate flavor now which is everything I enjoyed about mint with none of the things I disliked about it, so I'd recommend trying that.
Installed Ubuntu 16.04 yesterday and could not get graphics acceleration to work on Android's emulator. This should be the ideal environment for working with Android...
I cannot understand people that think Ubuntu is on par with OSX and Windows for workstation use.
