• KISSmyOS@lemmy.world
        9·
        11 months ago

        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.

        • Moobythegoldensock@lemm.ee
          2·
          11 months ago

          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.

  • akatsukilevi@kbin.social
    36·
    11 months ago

    Am I supposed to have Wifi driver issues? My laptop’s one always worked flawlessly without me having to even look at it

    • cholesterol@lemmy.world
      4·
      11 months ago

      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.

    • be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social
      41·
      11 months ago

      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)

  • onlinepersona@programming.devEnglish
    354·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • Victor@lemmy.world
      3·
      11 months 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.

    • Sowhatever@discuss.tchncs.de
      2·
      11 months ago

      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).

      • onlinepersona@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        I’ve had 3 raspberry pis (1,2,3) and none have had stable WiFi. After an hour or two it would drop and the logs would get spammed with some error that I can’t remember. Might be this issue wlan freezes in raspberry pi 3/PiZeroW (Not 3B+) . Similar issue Every two hours, like clockwork: “wpa_supplicant[313]: nl80211: kernel reports: key addition failed”.

        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.

        • Sowhatever@discuss.tchncs.de
          3·
          11 months ago

          Might be some AP incompatibility maybe, I’ve never seen those.

          XBMC didn’t have drivers for video acceleration, but the raspberry pi 1 was able to play 1080p flawlessly if you used omxplayer.

          Now kodi has the drivers included and the 4 can even play 4k up to certain bit rate.

          The new ones are too expensive tho, a used NUC is a much better deal.

          • onlinepersona@programming.devEnglish
            2·
            11 months ago

            Might be some AP incompatibility maybe, I’ve never seen those.

            Lucky you. Tried 4 different routers --> same issue.

            I gave up on RasPis long ago.

    • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
      21·
      11 months ago

      Welcome to 90% of all the anti-Windows arguments made on here by Linux users.

    • 0x4E4F@infosec.pubOPEnglish
      12·
      11 months ago

      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).

  • linuxdweeb@lemm.ee
    303·
    11 months ago

    Tell me you haven’t used Linux in the past ~20 years without telling me you haven’t used Linux in the past ~20 years

    • 0x4E4F@infosec.pubOPEnglish
      137·
      11 months ago

      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.

      • Moshpirit@lemmy.world
        3·
        11 months ago

        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

    • MyFairJulia@lemmy.world
      21·
      11 months ago

      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.

  • uis@lemmy.world
    23·
    11 months ago

    To be fair most wifi device manufacturers are bastards and don’t publicise manuals.

    • Aganim@lemmy.world
      112·
      11 months ago

      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.

      • azvasKvklenko@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        11 months ago

        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.

      • woelkchen@lemmy.world
        3·
        11 months ago

        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).

        EDIT: Accidentally wrote Linux instead of Intel.

        • SimplyTadpole@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          2·
          11 months ago

          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…

          • woelkchen@lemmy.world
            21·
            11 months ago

            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:

            which left me without the internet I need

            USB tethering your WiFi-connected phone would have worked as stop gap just as well. I had to do that a lot.

            • SimplyTadpole@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              1·
              11 months ago

              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.

          • woelkchen@lemmy.world
            31·
            11 months ago

            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.

              • woelkchen@lemmy.world
                1·
                11 months ago

                Realtek upstreamed their drivers in 2020 or 2021. I got rid of my last notebook with Realtek hardware for unrelated reasons.

            • SimplyTadpole@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              1·
              11 months ago

              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 :/

        • Prismey@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          11 months ago

          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)

      • michaelmrose@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        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.

        https://learnubuntu.com/install-mainline-kernel/ alternatively you can use a third party kernel repo which has a recent build with extras https://xanmod.org/ I’m using the second option.

        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.

        • Aganim@lemmy.world
          1·
          11 months ago

          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.

      • bertd2@lemmy.world
        1·
        11 months ago

        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.

    • PeWu@lemmy.ml
      3·
      11 months ago

      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

      • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
        1·
        11 months ago

        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.

      • 0x4E4F@infosec.pubOPEnglish
        55·
        11 months 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.

        It’s called manual driver install in Windows… pretty common with older hardware.

        • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
          31·
          11 months ago

          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.

          • 0x4E4F@infosec.pubOPEnglish
            32·
            11 months ago

            Agreed. Most drivers are found through Windows update.

            I guess I just have old hardware 🤷. My latest hardware is 9 years old… well, apart from my phone 😂.

    • s_s@lemmy.one
      11·
      11 months ago

      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…

      So yeah, it can still bite you.

    • chaogomu@kbin.social
      10·
      11 months ago

      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.

    • seaQueue@lemmy.world
      3·
      11 months ago

      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.

    • Montagge@kbin.social
      2·
      11 months ago

      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.

  • antihumanitarian@lemmy.worldEnglish
    223·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • AMDIsOurLord@lemmy.ml
    224·
    11 months ago

    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

    • Two2Tango@lemmy.ca
      2·
      11 months ago

      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

    • 0x4E4F@infosec.pubOPEnglish
      12·
      11 months ago

      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 😂.

  • Zoidberg@lemm.ee
    17·
    11 months ago

    Phew. For a second there I thought the book would be about Bluetooth in Linux.

  • Paranomaly@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    173·
    11 months ago

    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.