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.
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 :)
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.
This vibes with me, but fifteen years ago me.
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.
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.
Funny that my brand new laptop just arrived today and its own wifi card wasn't recognized in Windows, so I had to use my phone via usb-tethering. It's a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 (14APU8) by the way, Ryzen 7th gen, full AMD, OLED etc. It came without any OS (no way I'm paying for Windows lol) and my first Win11 experience on this laptop was "please choose a network to continue" and no networks were displayed at all, because wifi card had no drivers (Realtek btw). Windows setup wouldn't let me continue without a network, but there was no way to have a network. Funny Win11 moment right there. After some hours configuring everything I then installed my usual dual-boot Fedora and everything worked even in the live-usb. This meme is not valid for Linux anymore. Windows however, now thats a meme.
This is definitely a meme for AntiqueMemesRoadshow lol
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.
Old meme
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?
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
Trigger Warning
Realtek 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.
ReviOS for the Windows user. It's not a OS, but a collection of scripts which convert Windows in what it should have been.
I only had issues with this when setting up Kali Linux for learning pen testing. Fedora it worked out of the box.
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 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.
wifi drivers are fine nowadays
still have issues with some webcams tho
Oh man, those were the days.
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.
