But are you perhaps referencing to the situation with Broadcom just incrementing their chips and drivers for years, flooding the market with cheap but quirky chips? Do they still do that?
Mine just stopped working with brscan5 driver. It was a fast and quiet mobile scanner with high quality output. The new one is bigger, slower and louder and runs 90% of time in some photo mode. 🙁
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)
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.
The last time I had an issue with Linux drivers was in 2002, trying to set up a pppoe connection. I had no smartphone and there were no YouTube, Reddit, wikis, forums etc.
Back in 2016 I helped install some wifi drivers on a friend’s laptop in Ubuntu 16.04, which was not really a big deal.
I feel like these memes are made by Windows users :)
It’s insane how I just had this problem today. Had to tear out my network card in my Asus VivoBook 16. The drivers aren’t out for the MediaTek network card so I had to change it to an Intel one that I previously used.
What killed my interest in Linux in highschool. Kept trying to get Ubuntu working but couldn’t get the internet to work for anything. Given that every help guide boiled down to “Go to this website and download x” and I didn’t have internet because… no wifi, I ended up getting frustrated enough to quit the whole thing. Maybe someday.
The one I had was completely minor. The wifi on my NUC doesn't work if you use the proprietary driver but it does work with whatever the kernel for Mint 21.2 has in it.
It’s not so bad if you’re running a major distro kernel and they do some prerelease testing before cutting new kernel packages. But if you’re using the latest release from the kernel.org stable tree WiFi driver regressions happen somewhat regularly.
10-15 years ago, it was a problem dire enough to drive me back to windows until about the start of the pando, and I've not even thought about Wi-Fi drivers since coming back to Linux.
I did have issues with a cheap USB Wi-Fi dongle thing a few years back, but that was likely the fault of the dongle more than anything else, I know because it didn't really work under widows either.
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
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
Hey, as long as I ignore the thousand of entries in the error log I get every day from the iwlwifi kernel module crashing and restarting every 10 minutes its fine.
LPT: Swapping Wifi modules is (sometimes at least) stupidly easy to do. I had a shitty
Trigger WarningRealtek wifi card
and bought an Intel card to replace it for about 30 bucks. Begone random disconnects and packet drops. Note that this was on a laptop and it was still just an issue of removing a few screws and swapping modules.
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