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.
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.
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
If you want some irony, on a recent Ubuntu install I was able to access WiFi out of the box but the small windoze dual boot partition refused to connect to a WiFi 6 router. Tried upgrading driver, downgrading drivers, nothing… The computer came shipped with windows 10.
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.
This isn’t a Linux compatibility issue. You bought a device where the manufacturer told you in advance that a driver for the built-in wifi module doesn’t exist yet. It’s a product at the development stage.
So just follow the manufacturer’s recommendation from the product page: use a wifi dongle for now and pat yourself on the back for being an early adopter.
Having the device, I already tether the wifi. But it is indeed a compatibility issue: the old kernel drivers for the chip were janky and it’s doubtful how well they even worked the time. The code is apparently such a hot mess that the people who were working on it have stopped making progress. There is now skepticism that it will ever be fully functional.
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.
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