The kernel version they got. I have had hardware that didn’t work in one distro but it did on another, but their difference really was that one had kernel 5.11 and then other one 6.5. Big difference in terms of support.
Might not be a matter of driver, but a matter of firmware. If a distro allows the download/usage of third party non-free firmware code or not, a lot more hardware is supported. Not all distros do that.
If it’s ubuntu or ubuntu-based. Ubuntu has incorporated a lot of additional drivers/firmwares/support in their kernel versions than most others.