I’ve only had problems with wifi drivers twice, immediately after clean-installing fedora 38 on two different devices. Plugging my device into ethernet and updating fixed it instantly.
Not sure about iPhones, but I’ve used an android phone a couple times to both USB tether with data and to act as a WiFi receiver to download drivers in a pinch.
Use a second computer or a friend’s one to download the updates, get a USB ethernet adapter (a 100mbps one is like $5), put the system drive in a computer with lan, tether with another device via USB (phone, pi zero, etc) or use a different version/distro. I’m sure there are a bunch of other solutions.
I guess an ethernet to USB adapter might be your next best bet.
Alternatively, you could USB tether your phone if you have a good data plan
If you are in the unlikely event that you don’t have ethernet port to plug your device into, and no cell service, such as I was, you can use a spare wireless AP to get wifi if you’ve got one
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
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