Thanks for that resource; I've followed other "recommended" guides before and have a drawer full of mediatek and atheros based dongles that don't work reliably for me. Strangely enough my best experience (the b/g/n mentioned in my first comment) uses a realtek driver that is (or at least was at the time) out-of-tree, and it's made by TP-LINK which is generally recommended against because there is little correlation between part-numbers and chipsets used...
It's up to date, the buying guide is sensible and this repo always has drivers not yet in mainline.
[0] https://github.com/morrownr/USB-WiFi