I use Ubuntu Mate 16.04. Yeah, Linux tends to have a repository of older drivers of all sorts of things. The one tricky thing that I recently figured out was how to unblacklist my ethernet driver on my laptop. I don't even know how my Ethernet port stopped working for like the past year or longer. But I got it working again finally some hours ago. It turned out that the Ethernet driver was on a blacklist file. So, I went into the file and removed it and then added the driver name to another file to make sure the driver would load during startup. I don't know how many hours it took me to solve that problem. But am glad I solved the puzzle.
RE: Milk crate computer project: Adding the components and testing