There is also Synaptic which is a graphical front-end for apt, although I would definitely class it as less user friendly than Discover and the like.
I know if I was doing some Linux challenge with no terminal it would have to be my crutch.
Edit: Arch Linux has pamac which I used more frequently than the terminal back then.
I've had experience with the older Toughbook CF-18's and Linux (specifically Xubuntu actually), in my case mine worked out of box, but I had the digitizer option.
Could you give us the output of the lspci and lsusb commands, to see if it's being detected?