Linux kernel not supporting old hardware

I use Ubuntu since 5.04, and now i have 10.04. Here are my conclusions.

Genius Track 310 webcam - scrambled picture
Floppy drive - not working by default, needed to downgrade to udisks 1.0.1-1buld1
Analog Leadtek 2000 XP Global TV tuner card - using tvtime i get a very bad picture
Radeon 9250 & Radeon 9600 xt graphic cards not supporting 3d acceleration, needed to change graphic card to Nvidia.

I had to find drivers on the internet to make work my Canon Pixma iP1000 printer in earlier versions of ubuntu.

I wanted to upgrade to 11.10, and results are:
Didn't check the floppy, but all other above problems are the same +
FM tuner not working 'cause i like is it said on launchpad, oss is not enabled by default in kernel 2.6.35 and above (no /dev/mixer).

I think somebody once said that Linux has better hardware support then Windows. I really like linux for it's philosophy of free software, but the above statement doesn't get right. All of the above is working neat in Windows.

I don't want to buy expensive new hardware, every time kernel gets updated, because devels drop support for the old one, but i would like to update software 'cause programs like firefox don't work as expected (in this particular case firefox wasn't closing properly - Bug #306056)

What can be done?
Thank you.