If you want some irony, on a recent Ubuntu install I was able to access WiFi out of the box but the small windoze dual boot partition refused to connect to a WiFi 6 router. Tried upgrading driver, downgrading drivers, nothing… The computer came shipped with windows 10.
Like, bargain bin socks that are 8 pairs for $5, or novelty socks that are so thin you wear holes in them in two weeks? 100% agree. But a couple good pairs of quality socks are a game-changer, pair with a good pair of work boots and suddenly it’s not even that bad being on your feet all day.
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.
Yeah, they came in later on and that’s why I think they were “better”… learned from experience with the wifi drivers. And they weren’t really better, most of them still use binary blobs.
10 years ago was the turning point. I remember as late as 2010 -2012 having to use NDISwrapper to install the windows XP wifi drivers because there were no native drivers so you had to run the windows drivers through an emulation layer to get wifi to work. Even within the past 5 years I’ve had to compile my own fixes for realtek chips because the auto installed drivers were not working optimally
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