The good news: Broadcom got out of the labtop industry
Bad news: Broadcom is in the phone industry
Old meme
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.
Whenever I come across something I'd have to build myself, I just give up. No matter the instruction, there is always something wrong.
That is true on any LTS distro. Try rolling release, works without a glitch almost every time... well, at least on Void it does.
Funny. I had a laptop that would do full speed and full security. But not in windows. They crippled the card with the driver, unless you paid more.
This seems like a good thread to ask:
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?
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.
The best setup is to have multiple wired APs.
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.
Still using a super old wlan usb adapter and I'm like, it just works!
It’s been so much better…but I’m steeling myself to track down a WiFi direct bug that keeps disconnecting due to a timeout after 10 seconds. Linus give me strength!
LPT: Swapping Wifi modules is (sometimes at least) stupidly easy to do. I had a shitty
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.Trigger Warning
Realtek wifi card
I only had issues with this when setting up Kali Linux for learning pen testing. Fedora it worked out of the box.
ReviOS for the Windows user. It's not a OS, but a collection of scripts which convert Windows in what it should have been.
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.
wifi drivers are fine nowadays
still have issues with some webcams tho
The state of coreboot on modern hardware
The security problems of Linux over Android
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.
What about cups, they have no driver for that printer there?
I have a LaserJet 1000, 20+ years old, only works Linux and Windows x86 😂... so I just set up a peint server and shared it 🤷.
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.
Hint: :q!
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