Your post is very helpful, so please don't take my response as a criticism of you, but this is the very sort of thing that people really should not have to accept in Linux. There is no reason a distro designated as a long-term support release should not provide updated driver packages for the currently shipping versions of supported hardware. The user should really never have to build a driver from source. It's a deal killer for anyone with just an average level of technical ability. I've been using Linux for around 8 years, and it's still something I dread. In my experience, what often happens that the source code for the app/driver was built with a certain version of a specific distribution in mind (generally redhat), and something like the config script, etc. needs to be tweaked to get the damn thing to compile on another distribution. Even worse is the case when a required library needs to be of a greater version than the one included in your distribution before the code in question will compile. Now you need to compile the library from source too, and risk breaking god knows what other applications. Having a mix of deb/rpm packages from official repositories and programs compiled from source tends to make the system unstable over time. checkinstall helps, but still...