1y ago

It's OK if you cry

289 comments

Those have gotten a lot better in recent years. Last time I had an issue with WiFi drivers was in 2016.
Graphics drivers, on the other hand, especially Optimus...
- Some of us are still recovering from the trauma
  
  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.
  
  With you on that. I remember struggling in 2004 with WiFi drivers, ugh.
  
  I sometimes still think about the time I was trying to print in 1996.
  
  Iwlwifi firmware-a0-gf has not been detected… 😔
- 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...
  
  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.
  
  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
- 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.
  
  3% desktop marketshare, it's stop to pick up money, not go out of your way money.
- I just had to deal with nvidia breaking xwayland and making it unusable with an update

All my Wi-Fi just works on any machine I have Linux on. But yeah years ago this was not the case.
- Mine doesn't work. Definitely linux's fault that I destroyed its wifi giblets while moving my PC a bit too aggressively
- Now you get to struggle with audio drivers!
  
  Audio drivers have never really been a problem in my experience, but maybe you’re referring to pulseaudio? In which case, pipewire has been great!
- Agreed 👍.

Am I supposed to have Wifi driver issues? My laptop's one always worked flawlessly without me having to even look at it
- 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)
- Trust me when I say this, that wasn't always the case 😔.

ndiswrapper flashbacks o_o
- I thought I had completely erased this from my memory. Turns out I did not. I would thank you if it wasn't such a traumatic experience.
  
  I am so sorry.
- You are a bad person
  
  I accept this.
- Oh no. My broadcom laptop chip from 2005 was a major pain in the ass and this did not help 😆
  
  Yeah those were some dark times.
- BROADCOM .....
- Amusingly enough, one of the HP laptops I used in that era actually worked better with ndiswrapper somehow.
  It was the only one to do so though.
  
  Miracles happen I suppose. :D
- Debían 3.0... good times.

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.
- I mean it isn't Linux fault, but I wanted to install balenaos on my RaspberryPi and they don't support a WiFi chip in their kernel. Without WiFi the whole idea won't work for me. And I don't want to buy a new WiFi usb only because they don't want to add the drivers.
  My attempts to add it to the kernel and build it myself failed so far.
  
  I'm not faulting linux, I'm faulting the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Linux is their main operating system and they haven't picked a good WIFI hardware module for years. Dunno if the new raspberrypi 4 is better, but I'm not paying to find out.
  
  Try Void, maybe it has the adequate firmware binary blobs... worth a try 🤷.
- 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.
  
  For new hardware, it's no surprise when it doesn't work out of the box as most drivers are written for windows first. That's not a fault of linux.
- 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).
  
  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.
- Welcome to 90% of all the anti-Windows arguments made on here by Linux users.
  
  I'm not sure I follow... are you saying Linux users judge windows by very old problems?
- 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).

To be fair most wifi device manufacturers are bastards and don't publicise manuals.
- Fucking fuck realtek

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
- 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.
  
  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
- At least my notebook doesn't support the newer wifi standards, that I would need at the university eduroam network.
  I always have to hook up my phone and use usb-tethering
  
  WPA3?
- 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.

Jesus Christ OP use trigger warnings
- Broadcom
  *shudders
  
  Broadcom looks good next to Realtek, and both of them stand head and shoulders above Mediatek.
- WiFi be like that
- 🤣🤣🤣

Extremely outdated, but would still work with fingerprint sensors or NFC readers
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
- 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
  
  What display manager do you use? I have not been able to get Howdy to work without also typing my password with SDDM

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.

Am I the only person who doesn't have WiFi problems?
- 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.
- 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.
  
  Why tho
  
  Ah, a very common use case.
- 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.
- I don't think I have for more than a decade and I'm kinda amazed at how many upvotes this meme got.

Phew. For a second there I thought the book would be about Bluetooth in Linux.
- This is the real problem.

from when this shit comes from, 2000?
- 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.
  
  lol, could you realize your story would be the same if you just replaced relevant software names?

15 years ago this was an issue on my laptop.
- This is an issue on my 14 year old laptop today.

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 :)
- i find that the linux experience can vary wildly depending on the hardware you are running it on.
  when it works it changes the way you use your computer for the better, when it doesnt its nothing but frustration and broken keyboards
- I just think you've had the luck of not having a lot of unsupported hardware on Linux 😂.
  Yes, in general, things are OK driver wise, but remember when we had to resort to ndiswrapper to get wifi working... yeah, that was a pain 😔.

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
- 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
- I still have wifi woes on my old tablet. Works fine for a few minutes, then dies. Works fine in Windows. I'm about to reinstall on it. Maybe the next distro I try will work?
  
  This is probably some sort of firmware power management bug that the windows driver is working around. Try and see if you can find any documentation on it
- 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 😂.

If you think that's bad, try wifi on FreeBSD

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.
- How long ago was this?
  
  This was back in 2007-2008 ish. I believe the Ubuntu version was feisty fox at the time, if that helps.
- Weakling, I had this issue in highschool as well when first learning Linux, I just didn't do any of my assignments

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.
- One must imagine iwlwifi happy

You can buy a external AR9271 WiFi adapter for $20 thats fully free software/free firmware.
- Not in 2006
- Or switch wifi cards, have done that as well when there was no other option.

There are whole-ass companies selling laptops with Linux preinstalled now. They work. Even with Bluetooth.
- That's different. Lenovo supports the kernel, but doesn't ship some laptops with Linux. Two of mine (P14s Gen 1 and Gen 4) don't. I always have to work for NixOS, as does my friend for Arch.
- They're too expensive. Plus some people buy a lot of their IT equipment second hand.

I've never had an issue with any drivers on Linux, everything I use just works. Even some old obscure drawing tablet from 2005 that said it required you to install its driver worked instantly.
- This is true today. Had you tried that back in 2005, you'd very likely be fiddling with drivers. I specifically remember making a disk that contained all the drivers I'd need if I had to reinstall for any reason. Without it and without a network, you'd have to have another computer available to grab drivers from the internet.
  
  You had to do this with windows in 2005 too... In fact I've had to use a different computer to download drivers as recently as 2017 for a Windows 10 computer...

Me struggling with Realtek on Linux 🤝 One of my partners struggling with Nvidia on Linux
At least I managed to get a Linux-compatbile wifi USB later on, but it was pricey to import it and it's still quite slow :/
- When I had a Nvidia card in my computer years ago i had to use an Nvidia ppa for drivers. It was the only way I could get it to work.
  Nvidia PPA help
  
  New distros have all this built in. Just use endeavouros or something if u really want the good stuff

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.
- That's why I keep a 20m ethernet cable handy at all times 😂.
  
  I just keep Windows handy :p
  (Yes, I'm trolling)
- I just installed mint on a new laptop. The wifi surprisingly didn't work on the liveusb, but switching to the Edge release with a newer kernel worked fine.

Try Windows. It regularly breaks drivers (not only WiFi) on some hardware (mostly HP). I've never had issues with WiFi on Linux on HP, Dell, Microsoft Surface and even a Macbook.
- Damn, your knowledge of Windows must be subpar.
  
  I didn't say I couldn't fix the issues, but the fact that some of those issues exist even since XP is pretty bad. Just search around online and you'll find many posts about these driver issues. And then there's all of the ui inconsistencies and issues. Most of those are small, but still annoying once you see them. Especially when using Windows on a tablet, even Microsoft's own Surface line.
  For HP ZBooks for example there was an issue that completely prevented you from installing some updates like Windows 10 20H2 without any warning as to why it wouldn't install. It just failed at 61%. It turned out to be audio drivers for the audio chip in the dock. The only way to get it updated was to connect the dock, finding the audio device in device management and removing it. Then disconnect before Windows reinstalls the driver again.
  This has happened for multiple versions.

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.
- Swap the module for an Intel one.
- 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
- Why not use LAN instead?

The thing is, there's "iwd" and "wpasupplicant". 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 lt;...looking directly at you Arch....
- ...although, to be fair, a lot of distro's just kinda sort it out for you.
- I use Void BTW 😁.
- 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

This is definitely a meme for AntiqueMemesRoadshow lol

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.
- Trust me, it is. There is some obscure hardware out there. Plus, a lot of us still use hardware that was late XP time released and ndiswrapper was still around. So, for some of these cards, there is still no drivers for Linux (or buggy/unstable ones).
  
  I understand, but seeing this post right after my experience today was the biggest coincidence ever and kinda funny that it worked right away in Linux while in Windows I had to manually go get the drivers for it. Linux used to be bad, but it evolved A LOT in terms of drivers support while windows just kinda stayed the same. I remember facing the same problem of booting a new Windows install and having the wifi option completely gone (no drivers) in Windows 8... many years ago. Windows 11 and the experience is still the same. And it's a modern Realtek card, not even close to being obscure. This post + this experience today was just a nice internet moment

The good news: Broadcom got out of the labtop industry
Bad news: Broadcom is in the phone industry
- Really? They don't do Wi-Fi and BT chips any more?
  
  I think they still do some but its rare to find a Broadcom device

Never had problems with WI-Fi, but Nvidia Optimus
- Good lord Nvidia fucking optimus

Strange. One of them main reasons I wiped my Dell XPS OEM Windows and installed Linux was for -better- WiFi behaviour.
- I have installed Ubuntu, Pop!, or Mint as a fix for wifi issues on laptops probably about a dozen times over the past 20ish years.
  I have never had a wifi issue with linux. My husband has had issues with Linux and wifi in 2007. But that was 2007.
- That might be one of the very few cases.
  
  Possibly. Some XPS models (~9310) cheaped out on the WiFi chipset, which was really bad at reconnecting after sleep/suspend on Win 10/11 right out off the box.
  Tried a live Linux install and it worked perfectly, so made the switch as there was no Win-only software that I needed.

Try BSD
- You win.

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.
  
  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
  https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=E9Ftjm4FfMg6F2IU
  
  That is true on any LTS distro. Try rolling release, works without a glitch almost every time... well, at least on Void it does.
- This has to be the best script message I've ever seen 😂.
  
  Netgear WiFi USB drivers. Weren't good for much, but this one message was true as fuck!

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.
- What do I do if my laptop doesn't have an ethernet port?
  
  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

akmod and dkms to the rescue so you can watch as your kernel fights with the hardware in real time
- I just do lspci and install the adequate firmware 😂.

Just wait for the nvidia drivers lol

Old meme

Still using a super old wlan usb adapter and I'm like, it just works!

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.
- Have you checked what bands (channels) the repeater and the router use?
  
  The repeater uses a fixed channel (I think I set it to 7 or 8) and the router is set to automatic channel selection. Do you think fixing the router's channel would help?

Remember ndiswrapper?
- Don't remind me 😔...
- No, that buried deep in the box with suppressed memories. So thank you for reminding me.

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!

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.
- Capitalism at it's best...

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.
- Use that till the drivers get released... temporary solution, but there isn't a better one at the moment 🤷.

Gotta love notebooks and their weird and rarely wonderful Wifi-Chips attached via SDIO. Even the intel cards can have problems!
- Now we’re in the realm of weird sound drivers from integrated chipsets. Thankfully sof-firmware exists

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.

ReviOS for the Windows user. It's not a OS, but a collection of scripts which convert Windows in what it should have been.
- Just use NTLite yourself
- Works with 11 22H2. That's a year out of date.
  It's the same problem that all the prepackaged modified Windows have when I go to try them out in a VM. They always seems to be way out of date and with all the security problems of Windows, I don't want to run an old version just to save the time of cleaning out the telemetry and bloatware. Powershell scripts are more robust for me.
- Thank you internet stranger, I'm getting a new computer soon and I will be trying this!
  Is it smart enough to pull the activation code from the BIOS if I buy a computer that has that?
  
  Please do not trust modified windows installs based on old (22H2) update packs, you're much better off debloating your fresh, up-to-date, already licensed install using some powershell wizardry...
  Chris Titus has made a gui for this that you can access with a single powershell command. He also has made a guide on which settings he recommends to debloat a fresh install.
  This way you aren't entrusting your OS, privacy and data to some random unsecure repack. I can find the link for you if you would like :)

I only had issues with this when setting up Kali Linux for learning pen testing. Fedora it worked out of the box.

LPT: Swapping Wifi modules is (sometimes at least) stupidly easy to do. I had a shitty ::: spoiler 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.
- LPT - Line Print Terminal? 🤨
  
  Life Pro Tip

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.
- 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.
- 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 🤷.
  
  The driver shows up as "cups + gutenprint" and as far i can tell there is no other. so i guess that is already the one and only available driver.
  and i have to correct myself, it is a Canon, not a Brother. Canon MX300 from 2007.
  I mean it is not that big of a deal anyway. there is a single Windows machine left in this household that i can use for print jobs. and yeah, maybe i could use it as print server, that is actually a interesting idea lol.
- On windows the printer works perfectly
  Well, now I've heard everything.
- I specifically bought a Brother printer because they at least try to support Linux. My previous one Samsung was much worse, it had Google cloud print so I could still use it. But Google like always killed something people liked.

The state of coreboot on modern hardware
The security problems of Linux over Android

Isn't the main problem that most of them are proprietary, so they can't be shipped automatically if you want to avoid shipping a distro with proprietary software?
- The proprietary stuff is shipped as "firmware" (even though that's not always the case) allongside the distro's kernel. My best guess is that some distro out there (Ubuntu most probably) has obtained permission from a bunch of manufacturers to ship this "firmware" allongside it's kernel. The rest of the distro's are just riding this train, repackaging the firmware packages (if they can do it and redistribute it, why can't we 🤷).
  I might be mistaken, but this is the only thing that makes sense to me. Maybe it's a semi-coordinated joint effor as well, like someone obtains permission to share firmware, writes to a bunch of maintainers and devs that "this and this" binary blob is free for redistribution and it gets picked up by most popular distros out there.

wifi drivers are fine nowadays
still have issues with some webcams tho

Yet the Bluetooth drivers are great. What gives?
- Having coded against them, I'd argue that point. They're just as bad as Wi-Fi.
- 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.

Every wireless adapter I've used in Linux for the last 10 years has worked flawlessly.
- 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
- Yes, if it's on 5 to 10 year old hardware.
  
  I haven't had any issues with new hardware, either.

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