Wi-Fi used to be a pretty common thing to not work out of the box or to break in updates. I kept a usb Wi-Fi dongle in a bag as a backup just because of this.
It's a really simple problem to avoid, and IMO has been for years. It's been at least 10 years since I've bought something without intel wifi so maybe I'm out of touch, but I'm kind of astounded there are so many upvotes to the meme.
My rule for a very long time has been: Get something with intel wifi, or even atheros wifi, and you will almost certainly not have a problem. Get broadcom wifi and your problem will directly relate to how much effort your distro has put into trying to make broadcom not be shit. Stay the fuck way from realtek and mediatek.
That's it. I literally can't recall a time since about 2010 when I had a wifi problem with Linux on any device I owned.
I keep two of these in my bag for instant wifi on any device I might happen to be working on that doesn't have it. Most recently popped one into an old desktop I picked up for my youngest son, and have used it previously as a workaround for someone who had a laptop where the onboard wifi worked but would not come back from sleep. (That was broadcom, IIRC)
Timeshift works only with BTRFS subvolumes, thus, if you wanna have backups (snapshots), you have to have subvolumes and not install in the root of a BTRFS filesystem 😔.
If you want to you can just create a new subvolume, mount it temporarily and move all your files from root to there. Then you need to figure out how to make the new subvolume your root directory upon boot and you are done.
I know how to do that, you set the subvolume as the default one, thus, when mounting, if no options are passed, it always mounts that subvolume as root.
But, you have to disable that. Sure, I set it during install, cuz installers are stupid (if you tell it to install in /@, it will most probably moan), but disable it after first run (set the real root as the default subvol, i.e. mount point) and just add subvol mount options in fstab.
It’s just extra steps I have to do now 😒, that’s why the rant.
That’s only to backup/rollback the root though, right? If one’s looking to backup - say - their home dir, they can just recreate the home as a subvolume without reinstalling the system. Or am I mistaken?
Snapper also uses btrfs subvolumes to create snapshots, so if you did create them during your installation process, nothing to worry about.
I don’t remember if there is a way to create them after the installation, neither if it’s a tough process tho. I used to simply reinstall when I messed up with the subvolumes.
Yeah, but Timeshift uses the Ubuntu style subvolume naming, @ for root, @home for /home, so you have to create them that way, otherwise, it won’t work. It can work if you tell it to ignore home, but checks for @ as root on start up.
Yet everytime you open Twitter they act like they know what they’re talking about and send clown emojis whenever someone responds with a counter argument
Well, “tech illiterate” is relative. Some people may be ignorant of how their desktop works, but do wonderful things with PD or something else for synthesizing music, which requires knowing lots of math and music theory and signal processing.
Never be arrogant, please remember than people doing actual stuff - developers, business analysts, musicians, artists etc, and even lowly office workers sometimes, - are kinda more important than IT personnel. There are of course infrastructure and network admins who know their sh*t quite well and get paid accordingly.
I got haggled for being a macos user in college because, “pc was superior”. Turns out, that the CompSci people that gave me shit about my Mac, didn’t understand the difference between “PC” and "Windows’. My MacBook is still the best laptop I’ve ever owned. It literally survived having beer being pulled into it’s fan, and it’s battery turned into a balloon long ago… it still runs fine, almost a decade later (if I keep it plugged in). I was “tech illiterate” to people because I used a MacBook. But switching from windows to mac, got me comfortable with trying linux. It got me comfortable with being uncomfortable, because I was constantly trying to figure out how to “get this to work on macos”
I’ve met a lot of tech-illiterate people over the years… and they all gave me less shit about trying something different.
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.
The thing is, there's "iwd" and "wpa_supplicant". You use either one or the other, but not both. Sources like the Gentoo handbook will tell you that but, not all Wiki's do as good a job of pointing that out <...looking directly at you Arch...>.
I don’t understand anything to do with network configuration, I just install a few packages (iwd and wpa_supplicant included), start a few services, run a few commands, and hope it magically works after rebooting
I think it very depends on your hardware. I, personally, never had problems with it, on thinkpad which I use right now WiFi drivers were out of box even in Gentoo minimal ISO(It uses iwlwifi). But, every hardware that I have is about 10yo. And I think I haven’t any non-intel WiFi-cards.
But also one of my friends had to compile drivers for his card manually from github, and second friend had issues with his WiFi constantly disconnecting which we couldn’t solve.
That might also be a general network drivers vs. kernel version problem as well. I’ve had that on some Ubuntu falvors on various cards, it isn’t specific to just wi-fi, it happened on lan as well (just disconnects for a few ms and then connects again).
And yeah, one of the many reasons why I usually buy second hand hardware as well. One, it’s a lot cheaper, two, drivers for Linux are usually not a problem 😁.
Lots of people saying this is an old problem , but I have a new IdeaPad I bought a few months ago and any non-rolling release distro I find, the wifi hardware isn’t detected.
Until just a few weeks ago I couldn’t find any solution. Fortunately I finally found a way to build the drivers, but it still requires me to tether my phone to get internet long enough to download the source.
So the problem might be better but it’s not the non-issue some people are pretending it is.
generally speaking brand new hardware wont usually have proper support unless you are using newer versions of the kernel, thats not really limited to just wifi
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 still have issues with certain ASUS cards that simply crash the whole system when it gets too high a load or something. I’ve never been able to find a solution for it and I fear I never will.
They have a very very limited range. I have used them, but only if the AP is in the same room, otherwise, they crap out.
PS: Everything’s built from reinforced concrete and cinderblocks/bricks around here (seismically active region), so we have trouble with all sorts of wireless signals, including WiFi and 3/4G. 5G is out of the question here. We do have the towers, but less than 1% of users actually use them.
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