I was thinking something on those lines the other day. We like to say that Linux revives old computers, and I wouldn’t for a second consider putting Windows back on them, but I also have a case of hardware support so close, yet so far. I’ve two old laptops with nvidia chips from before the days of Optimus switiching, so you are forced to use the dGPU. Believe me, I wasted a whole weekend trying to make them use only integrated graphics. It was fine while they were supported under the proprietary nvidia driver, but as soon as support ended, nouveau became the only option and it absolutely crippled 3D performance, even on very old titles. Meanwhile, Windows still supports the old 340 driver needed for those graphics chips.

Mostly comes down to hardware vendors not bothering with Linux support and open-source in general. Which leaves support for affected devices down to volunteers having time to reverse-engineer a driver from scratch. To be clear, I don’t blame nouveau at all. It must have been a ton of work to even get the nouveau driver to its current state.

Maybe it was merged into the mainline kernel already but your distribution still has the older package?

Something I discovered recently is that you can connect an android phone to wifi, connect it to your computer, and enable “usb tethering” to pass the wifi connection to your computer as a wired connection. Maybe not practical for everyday use, but could still be useful!