I always had some Knoppix live CD/DVD which had better defaults than Ubuntu itself on hardware autodetection and setup. I think they used kudzu from RH for a good while plus custom patches.
Bear in mind the Knoppix creator had a blind wife, up to the point to creating A.R.I.A.N.E, one of the best distros for the blind (and it was merged with main KNOPPIX, making the distro one of the best accesible ones out there). Thus, proper audio mixing was mandatory.
With the bundled installer you could install it to as a Debian Testing install in the spot. As I didn't have internet at home, I remember using Knoppix before Debian Sarge because it had a huge amount of things to play and test without worrying about odd hardware setups.
Some of the context here is that that at the time, Ubuntu was aiming to work on as close to 100% of existing PCs as possible to make it available to the largest number of users. Knoppix had a lot of great features and also was very opinionated, and that had an influence on the set of hardware it worked well on by default. I evaluated basically every decision made there in terms of whether Ubuntu should adopt the same ones, and there were several that were just not good choices in terms of supporting the widest set of hardware possible.
Bear in mind the Knoppix creator had a blind wife, up to the point to creating A.R.I.A.N.E, one of the best distros for the blind (and it was merged with main KNOPPIX, making the distro one of the best accesible ones out there). Thus, proper audio mixing was mandatory.
With the bundled installer you could install it to as a Debian Testing install in the spot. As I didn't have internet at home, I remember using Knoppix before Debian Sarge because it had a huge amount of things to play and test without worrying about odd hardware setups.