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.
This was true maybe 10 years ago, nowadays Linux has better driver support than Windows. Printers, networking, input devices, everything I’ve tried is plug n play with Linux, Windows you gotta driver hunt.
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 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.
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.
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.
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. 🙁
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
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.
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.
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 :)
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