FYI: the TP-Link Archer that I mentioned uses a Realtek chipset. It does not work out of the box. You have to get an untrusted driver from GitHub, compile it with DKMS. Breaks with stable Ubuntu updates. The driver also seems to be quite flakey, regularly losing connection to the AP.
I really don't understand why there isn't a niche company that does nothing but make high quality peripherals that work in Linux. I just bought an atheros wifi card off amazon marked ENGINEERING SAMPLES ONLY, because no one sells the chipset I want standalone.
Intel chipsets are OEM only. Cards are readily available on Amazon, but are all gray-market apparently.
In short, I don't expect normal users to do this, but I'd expect them to be willing to pay triple the normal markup on $20-$50 componens if they "just worked" in Linux.
To be clear, I'm talking about having an ODM run off copies of Intel/Atheros reference boards. The engineering effort is as low as it gets for hardware manufacturing.
How do you expect a normal user to this?