I am recommissioning an older, cheapo Asus laptop for my parents. It should work fine except for the Mediatek wifi card, which is unsupported under Linux.
I thought I would get an Intel AX210. Can I just pop this one out and put that in, and reconnect the cables? Or is there something else I should consider, in terms of compatibility, or a better choice of card?
I believe AX210 is supported by the kernel without any additional work required. Mediatek is a mess… I bought a tp-link usb card, which uses a mediatek chip, with pretty good specs and struggled to get it working.
Regardless of the Linux compatibility, check first that the laptop will accept it. I don’t know about Asus, but I was bitten a few months ago when I tried to change the wifi card of my wife’s Lenovo and found that the firmware has some kind of whitelist for parts which prevents the use of any “non approved” hardware 
My Acer, on the other hand, accepted its new Intel card without problem 
It should work. Be sure to get the non pro version if it’s an AMD. Not the same, but I recently bought and assembled a new Framework laptop. I swapped out the AMD/MediaTek card for the AX210. Clipping the antenna back on took a few tries.
Thanks everyone for the comments, I got an AX210 and it is working fine. First it wasn’t (wasn’t even visible in lspci), but a BIOS update fixed that, I am still not sure why, the laptop model is not supposed to have a whitelist.
The AX210 is blazing fast, I can max out my nominal connection speed from 10 meters (no walls in between).
