It is a shame that distros appear to NOT offer setup disks with modern kernels so that your hardware can be recognized enough to go out and download a proper kernel. You have no idea how frustrating it is to download dozens of bootable images only to find that your network devices are unrecognized, regardless of distribution.
Sure, we get it it. maintaining an up to date kernel in your mainline distribution is not an easy job since everything depends on the kernel.
But, for everyone that was told they should try Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, whatever, their first experience will be with a problem that is unsolvable for most.