The very evening I installed Linux for the first time (I think it was Ubuntu 12.04), my Wifi stick was the first major hurdle. I was a teenager, had no idea about package managers and such, but the drivers for my stick were only available in an uncompiled format, so I had to first learn what build utils and kernel dev packages were, download them and their dependencies onto the windows PC of my dad and copy them onto a CD.
After I had figured all that out (took me.a while), I learned how to compile on the fly.
After I had run ./configure and it finallyfinally ran through without error, the config script had this last line:
Configure done successfully. Now type 'make' and pray
Things have changed over the years, but they haven't changed enough.