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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve only had problems with wifi drivers twice, immediately after clean-installing fedora 38 on two different devices. Plugging my device into ethernet and updating fixed it instantly.
Not sure about iPhones, but I’ve used an android phone a couple times to both USB tether with data and to act as a WiFi receiver to download drivers in a pinch.
Use a second computer or a friend’s one to download the updates, get a USB ethernet adapter (a 100mbps one is like $5), put the system drive in a computer with lan, tether with another device via USB (phone, pi zero, etc) or use a different version/distro. I’m sure there are a bunch of other solutions.
I guess an ethernet to USB adapter might be your next best bet.
Alternatively, you could USB tether your phone if you have a good data plan
If you are in the unlikely event that you don’t have ethernet port to plug your device into, and no cell service, such as I was, you can use a spare wireless AP to get wifi if you’ve got one
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
I have a few wifi adapters from china who only work properly under Linux lmfao
Did Microsoft actually infiltrate Lemmy or something? I’m hearing of issues about Linux that haven’t existed since the very first days of desktop Linux
The wifi chipset on my new MSI mobo isn’t supported on current LTS version of Mint - I had to install a more recent kernel, so there are still issues with newer hardware
Yeah, the Chinese stuff seems to work better under Linux… for some reason 😂. I one based on a Realtek chip (I think 🤔) and I couldn’t get passed a few hundred KB in Windows. Linux fried that baby, it did 1.5MB 😂.
I still have wifi woes on my old tablet. Works fine for a few minutes, then dies. Works fine in Windows. I’m about to reinstall on it. Maybe the next distro I try will work?
This is probably some sort of firmware power management bug that the windows driver is working around. Try and see if you can find any documentation on it
This isn’t a Linux compatibility issue. You bought a device where the manufacturer told you in advance that a driver for the built-in wifi module doesn’t exist yet. It’s a product at the development stage.
So just follow the manufacturer’s recommendation from the product page: use a wifi dongle for now and pat yourself on the back for being an early adopter.
Having the device, I already tether the wifi. But it is indeed a compatibility issue: the old kernel drivers for the chip were janky and it’s doubtful how well they even worked the time. The code is apparently such a hot mess that the people who were working on it have stopped making progress. There is now skepticism that it will ever be fully functional.
It works great until you try to use Bluetooth anything and need to connect and disconnect regularly (it can literally freeze your entire system), and don’t get me started with trying to get digital surround to work
There’s this one Bluetooth speaker with a microphone that I have, that I had hoped to use for calls, that has just refused to work. Spent hours trying to get them to work but had to admit defeat. But yes, things have improved significantly.
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