Well, openSUSE did it long before everyone else. So, Debian, Fedora, Arch?
I would kind of be surprised by Fedora, too, as I thought, they shipped out-of-the-box automatic snapshotting, but the comment from @bruhduh sounds like that is still a problem…
OpenSUSE does this as default, which is laudable. Mint will only use Btrfs if you manually tell it to, it just handles it gracefully once you do choose to use it.
Yeah i was surprised as well) thought automatic btrfs partitioning by fedora gui installer would suffice, but it’s not, it did not had subvolumes set after installation, so timeshift btrfs didn’t worked, after i set subvolumes timeshift started working, but after update from 38 to 39 everything broke and locked up my ssd
6 years ago, I was using a USB wifi adapter with my desktop (my friends next door paid for internet and we paid them half the bill to share).
I had picked this wifi adapter specifically because it had linux support, even though I used windows (I had an inkling I’d switch). So, I tried to switch but upon boot I couldn’t wifi because the adapters module wasn’t bundled by my distro so I had to instal ‘dkms’, but I couldn’t do that without an internet connection…
I had a similar experience trying to install a m.2 drive in my win7 PC. It needed a hotfix to work but Microsoft had taken down the downloads so I ended up finding out it was in an update pack from I think Lenovo’s website and pulled it out of that.
To get it to work in Windows I literally had to go to a website that was only Chinese, download a zip file, and extract a dll that would then work when pointed to.
It’s called manual driver install in Windows… pretty common with older hardware.
Most of those just go over Windows Update now or work with a generic driver that comes with Windows. Only really obscure drivers need manual installation.
That’s different. Lenovo supports the kernel, but doesn’t ship some laptops with Linux. Two of mine (P14s Gen 1 and Gen 4) don’t. I always have to work for NixOS, as does my friend for Arch.
Tell me you haven’t used more than 2 or 3 pieces of hardware in the past 20 years without telling me you haven’t used more than 2 or 3 pieces of hardware in the past 20 years.
I thought you thought about WiFi drivers because of the extra difficulty on not being able to search online, but I see now that this is just based on real experiences
If the card supports at least WPA2, it should support WPA2 Enterprise as well. Only cards manufactured in the last few years support WPA3. I doubt they would enforce WPA3 only.
My Intel Wireless AC 7265 on my Sony VAIO begs to differ. Certainly not brand-spanking new but it’s AFAIK less than 10 years old. The speed would at some point drop under Void Linux.
Funny that my brand new laptop just arrived today and its own wifi card wasn’t recognized in Windows, so I had to use my phone via usb-tethering. It’s a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 (14APU8) by the way, Ryzen 7th gen, full AMD, OLED etc. It came without any OS (no way I’m paying for Windows lol) and my first Win11 experience on this laptop was “please choose a network to continue” and no networks were displayed at all, because wifi card had no drivers (Realtek btw). Windows setup wouldn’t let me continue without a network, but there was no way to have a network. Funny Win11 moment right there. After some hours configuring everything I then installed my usual dual-boot Fedora and everything worked even in the live-usb. This meme is not valid for Linux anymore. Windows however, now thats a meme.
Trust me, it is. There is some obscure hardware out there. Plus, a lot of us still use hardware that was late XP time released and ndiswrapper was still around. So, for some of these cards, there is still no drivers for Linux (or buggy/unstable ones).
I understand, but seeing this post right after my experience today was the biggest coincidence ever and kinda funny that it worked right away in Linux while in Windows I had to manually go get the drivers for it. Linux used to be bad, but it evolved A LOT in terms of drivers support while windows just kinda stayed the same. I remember facing the same problem of booting a new Windows install and having the wifi option completely gone (no drivers) in Windows 8… many years ago. Windows 11 and the experience is still the same. And it’s a modern Realtek card, not even close to being obscure. This post + this experience today was just a nice internet moment
Linux used to be bad, but it evolved A LOT in terms of drivers support while windows just kinda stayed the same.
Agree on that part. It has gotten a lot better.
Still, I was hoping that they’ll eventually solve some of the problems with the WiFi hardware back in the ndiswrapper days. As it turns out, it’s 50/50. Some of it has drivers, some don’t. Sure I could go hunting for untested unreliable alpha stage drivers and compile them myself, but I was kinda hoping that we would be passed that on over 95, 96% of the hardware there is out there.
Well I myself have no patience at all to compile stuff myself, I can say I am half casual half linux nerd. I’m in the middle. Compiling stuff is too much, especially drivers and low level stuff like that. At that point I will just give up on the hardware or the OS/distro. That’s mainly why I still dual boot. I have a SIM Racing setup and even with drivers that exist already and many awesome community made GUI tools (like Overdrive GUI) that get updated almost daily (which is impressive), it still is very hit or miss and most of the times it is either not detected at all or just half working. Even after using linux myself since the Ubuntu 7 and Gnome 2 days, I still dual boot Windows because well… sometimes life is just more peaceful when you can just reboot your pc and have funcional hardware again. I work under linux and play under windows. That’s peace for me. Except nowadays I am staring to play non-Sim Racing stuff on linux too because Proton is amazing. But it still requires a lot of manual labor to make it work. And when I teach linux to other people I always teach the dual boot way and how they can easily jump back to what they are used to. In your case… I think I would just get a different wifi card if possible. If its an embedded one, well… maybe I would just get a new motherboard/device anyway, or just use another OS and call it a day. Sometimes it’s the better way. In your case probably the amount of people that need drivers for hardware like yours is diminishing day by day, so the probability of it ever getting fixed also diminishes. I found out that in the Linux world it’s always better to stay with mainstream hardware as much as possible.
Nah, I don’t currently have any problems with my hardware. I just happen to have acces to a lot of old hardware (at work) and play with that when I have some free time.
Of course, I also (still) dual boot. Mostly because of software that just doesn’t run in Wine… and for work. But other than that, I’m mostly on Linux.
Isn’t the main problem that most of them are proprietary, so they can’t be shipped automatically if you want to avoid shipping a distro with proprietary software?
The proprietary stuff is shipped as “firmware” (even though that’s not always the case) allongside the distro’s kernel. My best guess is that some distro out there (Ubuntu most probably) has obtained permission from a bunch of manufacturers to ship this “firmware” allongside it’s kernel. The rest of the distro’s are just riding this train, repackaging the firmware packages (if they can do it and redistribute it, why can’t we 🤷).
I might be mistaken, but this is the only thing that makes sense to me. Maybe it’s a semi-coordinated joint effor as well, like someone obtains permission to share firmware, writes to a bunch of maintainers and devs that “this and this” binary blob is free for redistribution and it gets picked up by most popular distros out there.
But at the same time, they do offer increased security when they work correctly. It’s like saying we shouldn’t use virtualization anymore because historically some virtual devices have been exploitable in a way that you could escape the VM. Or lately, Spectre/Meltdown. Or a bit of an older one, Rowhammer.
Sometimes, security measures open a hole while closing many others. That’s how software works unfortunately, especially in something as complex as the Linux kernel.
Using namespaces and keeping your system up to date is the best you can do as a user. Or maybe add a layer of VM. But no solution is foolproof, if you really need that much security use multiple devices, ideally airgapped ones whenever possible.
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