The very evening I installed Linux for the first time (I think it was Ubuntu 12.04), my Wifi stick was the first major hurdle. I was a teenager, had no idea about package managers and such, but the drivers for my stick were only available in an uncompiled format, so I had to first learn what build utils and kernel dev packages were, download them and their dependencies onto the windows PC of my dad and copy them onto a CD.
After I had figured all that out (took me.a while), I learned how to compile on the fly.
After I had run ./configure and it finallyfinally ran through without error, the config script had this last line:
Configure done successfully. Now type 'make' and pray
Things have changed over the years, but they haven't changed enough.
Yep, been in the same boat 😂. Was an LTS fan for a long long time till I realized… this shit ain’t worth it 😂.
Everthing there is out there in 99% of the cases compiles against latest libraries. And well, LTS is just… lagging behind 🤷. So, you solve one lib dependcy and then, bam, another one pops up… OK, solved that one, bam, another one 😒… it just gets frustrating to compile stuff on LTS.
And then you get all sorts of errors from the package manager cuz you did the unthinkable - install latest libs on an LTS distro.
LTS is good for one thing only nowadays - servers.
Compiling starts to work rather well once you've done it a few times. Especially when you get more used to understanding what ./configure tries to tell you. You should really try to get behind that, since you Linux will
So this is random but I had a terrible wifi card (pci-e) that I bought off Newegg just a couple years ago. To get it to work in Windows I literally had to go to a website that was only Chinese, download a zip file, and extract a dll that would then work when pointed to. I figured this out from an obscure forum post that I can’t even find now.
I just decided to reformat that sucker with Ubuntu for use as a media server and the driver was already ready to go. Already ready already!
It also has a MIDI in card that was picked up immediately. Windows required a CD from 2016 to get working. This is most definitely an outdated meme.
I had a similar experience trying to install a m.2 drive in my win7 PC. It needed a hotfix to work but Microsoft had taken down the downloads so I ended up finding out it was in an update pack from I think Lenovo’s website and pulled it out of that.
To get it to work in Windows I literally had to go to a website that was only Chinese, download a zip file, and extract a dll that would then work when pointed to.
It’s called manual driver install in Windows… pretty common with older hardware.
Most of those just go over Windows Update now or work with a generic driver that comes with Windows. Only really obscure drivers need manual installation.
6 years ago, I was using a USB wifi adapter with my desktop (my friends next door paid for internet and we paid them half the bill to share).
I had picked this wifi adapter specifically because it had linux support, even though I used windows (I had an inkling I’d switch). So, I tried to switch but upon boot I couldn’t wifi because the adapters module wasn’t bundled by my distro so I had to instal ‘dkms’, but I couldn’t do that without an internet connection…
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.
Funny that my brand new laptop just arrived today and its own wifi card wasn’t recognized in Windows, so I had to use my phone via usb-tethering. It’s a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 (14APU8) by the way, Ryzen 7th gen, full AMD, OLED etc. It came without any OS (no way I’m paying for Windows lol) and my first Win11 experience on this laptop was “please choose a network to continue” and no networks were displayed at all, because wifi card had no drivers (Realtek btw). Windows setup wouldn’t let me continue without a network, but there was no way to have a network. Funny Win11 moment right there. After some hours configuring everything I then installed my usual dual-boot Fedora and everything worked even in the live-usb. This meme is not valid for Linux anymore. Windows however, now thats a meme.
Trust me, it is. There is some obscure hardware out there. Plus, a lot of us still use hardware that was late XP time released and ndiswrapper was still around. So, for some of these cards, there is still no drivers for Linux (or buggy/unstable ones).
I understand, but seeing this post right after my experience today was the biggest coincidence ever and kinda funny that it worked right away in Linux while in Windows I had to manually go get the drivers for it. Linux used to be bad, but it evolved A LOT in terms of drivers support while windows just kinda stayed the same. I remember facing the same problem of booting a new Windows install and having the wifi option completely gone (no drivers) in Windows 8… many years ago. Windows 11 and the experience is still the same. And it’s a modern Realtek card, not even close to being obscure. This post + this experience today was just a nice internet moment
Linux used to be bad, but it evolved A LOT in terms of drivers support while windows just kinda stayed the same.
Agree on that part. It has gotten a lot better.
Still, I was hoping that they’ll eventually solve some of the problems with the WiFi hardware back in the ndiswrapper days. As it turns out, it’s 50/50. Some of it has drivers, some don’t. Sure I could go hunting for untested unreliable alpha stage drivers and compile them myself, but I was kinda hoping that we would be passed that on over 95, 96% of the hardware there is out there.
Well I myself have no patience at all to compile stuff myself, I can say I am half casual half linux nerd. I’m in the middle. Compiling stuff is too much, especially drivers and low level stuff like that. At that point I will just give up on the hardware or the OS/distro. That’s mainly why I still dual boot. I have a SIM Racing setup and even with drivers that exist already and many awesome community made GUI tools (like Overdrive GUI) that get updated almost daily (which is impressive), it still is very hit or miss and most of the times it is either not detected at all or just half working. Even after using linux myself since the Ubuntu 7 and Gnome 2 days, I still dual boot Windows because well… sometimes life is just more peaceful when you can just reboot your pc and have funcional hardware again. I work under linux and play under windows. That’s peace for me. Except nowadays I am staring to play non-Sim Racing stuff on linux too because Proton is amazing. But it still requires a lot of manual labor to make it work. And when I teach linux to other people I always teach the dual boot way and how they can easily jump back to what they are used to. In your case… I think I would just get a different wifi card if possible. If its an embedded one, well… maybe I would just get a new motherboard/device anyway, or just use another OS and call it a day. Sometimes it’s the better way. In your case probably the amount of people that need drivers for hardware like yours is diminishing day by day, so the probability of it ever getting fixed also diminishes. I found out that in the Linux world it’s always better to stay with mainstream hardware as much as possible.
Nah, I don’t currently have any problems with my hardware. I just happen to have acces to a lot of old hardware (at work) and play with that when I have some free time.
Of course, I also (still) dual boot. Mostly because of software that just doesn’t run in Wine… and for work. But other than that, I’m mostly on Linux.
Tell me you haven’t used more than 2 or 3 pieces of hardware in the past 20 years without telling me you haven’t used more than 2 or 3 pieces of hardware in the past 20 years.
I thought you thought about WiFi drivers because of the extra difficulty on not being able to search online, but I see now that this is just based on real experiences
If the card supports at least WPA2, it should support WPA2 Enterprise as well. Only cards manufactured in the last few years support WPA3. I doubt they would enforce WPA3 only.
My Intel Wireless AC 7265 on my Sony VAIO begs to differ. Certainly not brand-spanking new but it’s AFAIK less than 10 years old. The speed would at some point drop under Void Linux.
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.
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 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.
Lemmy needs polls. The last time I had problems with WIFI drivers was… 15 years ago? On a laptop bought in a supermarket that originally came with Windows Vista. Oh, and the raspberry pi - fuck raspberry pis. They can’t pick wifi module worth shit.
I mean it isn’t Linux fault, but I wanted to install balenaos on my RaspberryPi and they don’t support a WiFi chip in their kernel. Without WiFi the whole idea won’t work for me. And I don’t want to buy a new WiFi usb only because they don’t want to add the drivers.
My attempts to add it to the kernel and build it myself failed so far.
I’m not faulting linux, I’m faulting the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Linux is their main operating system and they haven’t picked a good WIFI hardware module for years. Dunno if the new raspberrypi 4 is better, but I’m not paying to find out.
All single board computers have driver problems because they require custom kernel forks that can’t or don’t get mainlined for whatever reason (usually laziness), but Raspberry PI is actually the best when it comes to that stuff.
So when you buy an SBC, you need to ask yourself: will the company continue to develop/update/patch their custom kernel fork now that they shipped? Or will they just abandon it and move on to the next product? 9 times out of 9.01, it’s the latter.
Raspberry, seriously? What problems are you seeing?
I have a raspberry pi 3 acting as a 5GHz access point for as long as it’s been on the market, I can remember one time I had to restart it because of some wonkiness. About a dozen others as clients, never had an issue there either, fast and stable enough.
All using the default os (raspbian first, raspberry os later).
After that, I gave up on WiFi on Raspberries and used LAN, but they are so underpowered… my nextcloud instance took ages to do anything, XBMC (now Kodi) was slow and couldn’t render videos > 720p (it was struggling with 720p honestly), even a simple audio proxy over bluetooth (forward bluetooth audio from phone to speaker) barely functioned as the bluetooth cut out or it was janky as hell.
It’s easier to put a old phone as a server than a raspberrypi.
There are some oddball cards out there that need the linux firmware xxx (insert manufacturer instead of xxx) binary blobs in order to work, but yes, those cards are rare nowadays and mostly older hardware uses that (as you mentioned, hardware from 10+ years ago).
Had problems about 3 years ago, got a new laptop from work and the WiFi hardware was too new and didn’t have support in the kernel yet. Took a year or something, maybe less, until it worked.
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.
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.
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