I never have. Just thinking about WiFi and Bluetooth drivers on random laptops still puts me into a full flashback state. (My first experience was back in 2002, I think?)
However, getting all of that stuff working was the best learning experience I ever had. At the time, I was just learning about IT security and WiFi pcap was all the rage back then.
I never have. Just thinking about WiFi and Bluetooth drivers on random laptops still puts me into a full flashback state. (My first experience was back in 2002, I think?)
Same, flashbacks to being in college trying to get Wi-Fi working in Fedora on my laptop and then struggling to get it to work with my uni’s new Wi-Fi system. Frustrating, but a great learning experience as you said.
Even a decade ago it usually meant ticking a box that you also allowed nonfree drivers.
Even Debian allowed you to download the specific nonfree driver you needed and add it (without Internet) at imaging so post install you could connect with wifi and not just Ethernet.
It’s come a long way. But doesn’t anyone else remember when windows did not have drivers and you’d constantly be confronted with “have disk”?
I mean, the amount of drivers for old hardware I still have saved… Because before win10 nothing would reliability always fetch the driver you need from the net…
Ticking the non-free driver box was child’s play. As late as like 2012 I remember needing to download NDISwrapper so I could make the windows drivers work through a compatibility layer
I recall jaunty jackalope being the Ubuntu version that became my full time os. It was that version that my IBM x31 had everything taken care of on install with the third party drivers checked. I feel like the LTS version following that was where you could buy a generation previous of any hardware and it’d work without much fuss.
This reminds me of the big USB drive of drivers that we had at a PC repair shop. When Windows 7 failed to find drivers, we’d stick that in and give it a scan.
The nvidia driver has had this bug for a year now, still unfixed. Games will randomly crash with an Xid 109 error in dmesg. Some people (including myself) are unable to play games like Cyberpunk, Resident Evil 2-3-4-7-8 and Metro Exodus. And it’s not linked to proton either, it sometimes also crashes xorg itself, forcing a reboot. I’m starting to think nvidia will never bother fixing it.
I haven’t had any recent issue with those either. Just make sure both the nvidia driver and the kernel are from your distros repository, and you always update them both at the same time.
My new laptop has a nvidia card in it. One time it stopped working after a update so I downgraded the drivers so I can wait entail the next update they do work. Besides that it have worked great. I am on fedora so rpmfusion is where the drivers are from.
Eh, my main reason for going KDE is every time I try Gnome, it feels like “what do I do now” and “where is the program I opened”
I know that would get better with time spent using it, but then again, KDE feels like I can make it do what I want a lot easier
And none of the other DEs look as nice and polished, which, I know, that’s not the important part … But dammit, I’m gonna be spending a lot of time staring at it, I’d like it to look good to me at least
The last time I was meaningfully using Linux was around the time of Ubuntu 8.04 - my experience was the opposite of this.
When I have the time, I’ll be dipping back in on Zorin (which I think defaults to modded KDE) - I’ve spun up VM, and it seems like it’s worth a shot… I just need to confirm it’ll play the small handful of games I play, find a slicer app, and pull the trigger. Damn near everything else is Web-based or self-hosted.
There’s a lot to be said for familiarity and its impact on productivity… Which is why I hate when UI layouts change for no apparent reason other than to be different.
They do, and judging by their environment, pretty wealthy as well. Plus a happy family. As opposed to being unhinged enough to give finger guns to a laptop or be bombarded with “tech stuff”. Great ad for gnome :)
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