But are you perhaps referencing to the situation with Broadcom just incrementing their chips and drivers for years, flooding the market with cheap but quirky chips? Do they still do that?
Mine just stopped working with brscan5 driver. It was a fast and quiet mobile scanner with high quality output. The new one is bigger, slower and louder and runs 90% of time in some photo mode. 🙁
Possibly. Some XPS models (~9310) cheaped out on the WiFi chipset, which was really bad at reconnecting after sleep/suspend on Win 10/11 right out off the box.
Tried a live Linux install and it worked perfectly, so made the switch as there was no Win-only software that I needed.
Installed Ubuntu on my first netbook and had to sit in the stairs to the second floor jacked into the single Ethernet cable we had for a few hours to troubleshoot it.
I haven’t used every distro, but it seems like most of them are plug and play these days.
I just installed mint on a new laptop. The wifi surprisingly didn’t work on the liveusb, but switching to the Edge release with a newer kernel worked fine.
Printer are worse. try to get a decade old brother to print more than a half page without completely freezing and needing a hard restart. driver is unmaintained unfortunately.
on Windows the printer works perfect though. which makes me quite unhappy :|
wifi on the other hand is not a problem i can remember. even on a 15 year old laptop, the AUR has a driver that it extracts from a ancient .deb and then patches it to make it work with modern kernels. lovely.
I specifically bought a Brother printer because they at least try to support Linux. My previous one Samsung was much worse, it had Google cloud print so I could still use it. But Google like always killed something people liked.
The driver shows up as “cups + gutenprint” and as far i can tell there is no other. so i guess that is already the one and only available driver.
and i have to correct myself, it is a Canon, not a Brother. Canon MX300 from 2007.
I mean it is not that big of a deal anyway. there is a single Windows machine left in this household that i can use for print jobs. and yeah, maybe i could use it as print server, that is actually a interesting idea lol.
Try searching online for cups filters. Maybe someone made a custom filter file for that printer that works… worth a shot 🤷. I’ve had luck hunting down custom filters for some obscure printers in the past.
Setting up a shared printer in Windows is (could be) a PITA though… not being able to choose SMB versions can make your Linux setups with SMB a pain 😔. That’s why I prefer Linux with samba as the print server, you can fine tune almost everything to make it work with any Windows and Linux install.
Also, true story, LTSC 2019 can’t see shares from LTSC 2021, but the opposite works without a problem 🤣. It was a bug, they eventually fixed it, but took them like a year or so (they threw the ball at users, not setting up the shares correctly 😒), and I already reinstalled all rigs with LTSC 2019, so… too late MS 🤷… I haven’t used LTSC 2021 from that point on.
It’s the newer Wi-Fi chips that have issues, those for which drivers aren’t yet released. There always seems to be a year-long delay between the next gen laptops being released and the wifi drivers for them.
It’s the same problem that all the prepackaged modified Windows have when I go to try them out in a VM. They always seems to be way out of date and with all the security problems of Windows, I don’t want to run an old version just to save the time of cleaning out the telemetry and bloatware. Powershell scripts are more robust for me.
I have a Retropie and I use wpa_supplicant to manage my connection there. It looks like this: the router is downstairs and I use a repeater in the room next to the Retropie to have better wifi coverage upstairs. The router itself is reachable, but the signal strength is worse. So, as a fallback, I put both the router and the repeater connection in my wpa_supplicant config file with the router having a lower priority. Still, sometimes my retropie clings onto the worse connection for some reason and there is no way to change it but to do a complete reboot. If I just restart the wifi with ifdown and ifup, it will either not reconnect to any wifi at all or reconnect to the shittier connection again, it’s kinda a fifty-fifty. A reboot will always properly choose the best signal tho and I am very confused why this is happening. Any ideas?
The repeater uses a fixed channel (I think I set it to 7 or 8) and the router is set to automatic channel selection. Do you think fixing the router’s channel would help?
See if they’re overlapping, do a survey with your phone and WiFiAnalyzer (or another app). If they’re close or overlapping, set the router to a fixed channel as well.
Set your wpa_supplicant to use the BSSID of the repeater’s access point and don’t put the SSID in the conf file. Then it will connect to only the repeater.
If the repeater just re-transmits tho main AP’s BSSID and packets, you need a better setup. Cheap WiFi extenders do this and almost always cause collisions, making the overall speed slow at all points.
Try Windows. It regularly breaks drivers (not only WiFi) on some hardware (mostly HP). I’ve never had issues with WiFi on Linux on HP, Dell, Microsoft Surface and even a Macbook.
I didn’t say I couldn’t fix the issues, but the fact that some of those issues exist even since XP is pretty bad. Just search around online and you’ll find many posts about these driver issues. And then there’s all of the ui inconsistencies and issues. Most of those are small, but still annoying once you see them. Especially when using Windows on a tablet, even Microsoft’s own Surface line.
For HP ZBooks for example there was an issue that completely prevented you from installing some updates like Windows 10 20H2 without any warning as to why it wouldn’t install. It just failed at 61%. It turned out to be audio drivers for the audio chip in the dock. The only way to get it updated was to connect the dock, finding the audio device in device management and removing it. Then disconnect before Windows reinstalls the driver again.
Fedora be like) i broke my recent fedora installation because of that, installed fedora 38 two months ago, made sub volumes, updated to 39, and it broke, and locked up whole ssd with it, had to recover data
This was true maybe 10 years ago, nowadays Linux has better driver support than Windows. Printers, networking, input devices, everything I’ve tried is plug n play with Linux, Windows you gotta driver hunt.
I’ve never had an issue with any drivers on Linux, everything I use just works. Even some old obscure drawing tablet from 2005 that said it required you to install its driver worked instantly.
This is true today. Had you tried that back in 2005, you’d very likely be fiddling with drivers. I specifically remember making a disk that contained all the drivers I’d need if I had to reinstall for any reason. Without it and without a network, you’d have to have another computer available to grab drivers from the internet.
You had to do this with windows in 2005 too… In fact I’ve had to use a different computer to download drivers as recently as 2017 for a Windows 10 computer…
Well, yes. I wasn’t really intending to make a comparison. I was just explaining the meme. There was a time when getting your wifi/network card going in Linux was somewhat of a hassle for many.
It’s been so much better…but I’m steeling myself to track down a WiFi direct bug that keeps disconnecting due to a timeout after 10 seconds. Linus give me strength!
I had a case where fingerprint sensor was working out of the box fortunately. Although I had a problem where cryptfs would stop authenticating successfully with fingerprint sensor after distro update
Absolutely not outdated. I had a horrible time getting my hands on a working driver for the WiFi card in my brand new laptop last year. Horrible enough to resort to Ubuntu and even that gave me the finger. When I finally had it working I had to manually rebuild the damned thing each kernel update because I couldn’t convince DKMS to do it automatically. Had to wait two or three kernel releases for the card to be supported ‘out of the box’.
So no, fuck WiFI drivers in Linux. If it is not in the kernel and the manufacturer doesn’t provide one, don’t expect fun times.
Outdated for Linux Intel, still valid for Broadcom, probably not so bad for somewhat recent Realtek and AMD/Mediatek (last I’ve read is that Mediatek WiFi hardware sucks in general and disconnects happen on Windows, so the same happening on Linux would be the fault of the Linux driver).
I installed linux on a new pc 2 days ago, had no problem with the wifi drivers. I don’t know if it’s the fact that the wifi is integrated on the motherboard, but it was up and running without any tweeking from me (unlike windows)
But was the cause the Linux driver or the hardware? If the fault is the hardware and the experience on Linux is the same as on Windows, it’s feature parity.
If in doubt, get an Intel WiFi card. Even in otherwise not upgradeable notebooks those are usually not soldered on. Also whatever is in a Steam Deck OLED looks like a good pick.
Does Intel sell wifi cards that use USB rather than PCI slots? My motherboard doesn’t have the slot for a wifi PCIe card, and I’ve only seen Intel sell those :/
I can absolutely confirm it’s still valid for Realtek. I had one using the RTL8812AU chipset that basically no kernel version nor distro provided out of the box, so I constantly had to download a third-party driver from Github and manually patch it via dkms, or use a third-party repository containing the driver package… and then the driver broke so badly that it wouldn’t let me update at all unless I uninstalled it, which left me without the internet I needed to actually update, effectively leaving me unable to update until I could buy another one from Mediatek that’s compatible.
And said Mediatek wifi is really slow, so I just went from the frying pan into the fire…
I can absolutely confirm it’s still valid for Realtek. I had one using the RTL8812AU chipset
Yeah, and I was explicitly writing about recent chips. RTL8812AU isn’t recent. The very latest Windows driver is from 2018, so the chip itself was released a good while before that.
I know exactly what you had to go through because I had to do the same with mine a couple of years ago but since then for newer chips Realtek started contributing to Linux itself:
Ahh I see, thanks for clarifying. It seems that where I live mostly only has the older Realtek chips for sale, so I likely mostly had bad luck.
I tried USB tethering, but it wouldn’t work for some reason… I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I think either the phone or my computer couldn’t detect each other.
I do occasionally fall for just buying shtuff without a quick google search to see if my kernel would be cool with it, but I have an even greater number of stories about good experiences with Windows shtuff driving me bonkers.
For example, the Brother ADS-1200 under WIndows beats anything SANE supported scanners can do hands down. Scan to PDF with excellent compression and top of the line OCR. The spousal unit needed a scanner and I found a good deal on an ADS-2100. Under Linux, scan results are totally comparable to the ADS-1200, so the hardware is fine. But the Windows software for this scanner is crap. JPEG and TIFF are identical to the Linux scans, but OCR and PDF compression are atrocious. I’m 100% sure that if I were to edit a table in the ADS-1200 software, it would happily apply the same excellent results to the ADS-2100. But I’ve had it with hacking Windows goop, been there, done that, got the t-shirt, so onto Craig’s list the 2100 goes… Built in obsolescence, welcome to the Windows world.
With Linux, once the kernel accepts it, it’s smooth sailign without too many vendor introduced hickups.
And even on Windows, if you need to use third party scan software like VueScan because your scanner happens to be older than your Windows. it’ll work but it won’t outperform SANE supported scanners.
Situations like that aren’t very common these days. It usually happens when your hardware is very much new and drivers aren’t yet in the Linux kernel, or they are in the newest mainline, but your distro wont ship it for some more time. For that matter, it’s always bad when the kernel doesn’t have the drivers built in and it always requires dealing with DKMS or akmod whether it’s wifi, webcam, bluetooth or GPU (that’s why NVIDIA tends to be problematic on some systems).
That being said, the meme only works for anecdotal cases.
If it is not in the kernel and the manufacturer doesn’t provide one, don’t expect fun times.
This could be shorted to if your device has no driver it wont work which is obviously true.
If you have very recent hardware and you find it doesn’t work out of the box on stable options the easiest thing to do is install a more recent kernel. Even current Ubuntu non-LTS is 2-4 releases behind.
It’s even easier in arch/void where the latest kernel is already available.
Respectfully if DKMS wasn’t automatically kicking in then you configured it incorrectly. It’s a lot easier to just rely on a package that sets this up for you properly. If for some reason this can’t be done the logical thing to do is script the process so that all operations are completed in the appropriate order that way you needn’t remember to do one then the other.
This could be shorted to if your device has no driver it wont work which is obviously true.
What I tried to tell is that if you have to rely on community driver projects, don’t expect fun times, at least not when it comes to Realtek in my recent experience.
If you have very recent hardware and you find it doesn’t work out of the box on stable options the easiest thing to do is install a more recent kernel.
I already had the latest available kernel at the time, as in: the very latest officially released kernel by kernel.org. Ubuntu was just a last-ditch effort as it will sometimes have drivers included that other distros might not have, normally I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-feet pole and go either Arch or Manjaro. The driver simply wasn’t included in the kernel. How do I know? Because I stumbled upon some discussions that mentioned the lack of support and 3 kernel releases later support for my card was specifically mentioned in the changelog.
Respectfully if DKMS wasn’t automatically kicking in then you configured it incorrectly. It’s a lot easier to just rely on a package that sets this up for you properly.
Yes, like a Realtek-XXXX-dkms package, which simply didn’t work. I’ve configured stuff for DKMS before, scripting stuff for Linux is part of my daily workload, so yeah, you don’t need to tell me scripting beats doing stuff manually.
The fact that getting an f*cking wifi card to work takes this much effort is what I meant with ‘not fun times’ and for me validates the meme, anecdotal as it might be.
Resorting to other distros, configuring additional repos so you can install a different kernel version, having to try different community projects to see which gives you a working driver, having to deal with getting DKMS to work, this is all stuff which hampers Linux adoptment. And without more adoptment we won’t have to expect more support from manufacturers for desktop related consumer hardware. So yeah, that does make me cry a bit. It’s a catch-22 unfortunately.
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