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.
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?)
With you on that. I remember struggling in 2004 with WiFi drivers, ugh.
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
Oh god, why did you have to trigger that memory???
I mean, if you buy broadcom you reap what you sow. And 2012 was 11 years ago. ;-)
When I bought my laptop i was using windows and didn’t research Linux compatibility :(
And yup. A decade ago was when Linux turned a corner on the wifi driver front, 11 years ago was hell
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 just had to deal with nvidia breaking xwayland and making it unusable with an update
You should switch to rolling release memes, yours are outdated.
Have some respect for the classics
Please get this bad boy working well on rolling release, then:
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.
Yeah, you’re too young to remember the glory days 😂.
I’m old enough but it’s not the case anymore.
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 😔.
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!
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.
Quick correction, the Pi5 is the new one
Thanks. I’m out of the loop.
Try Void, maybe it has the adequate firmware binary blobs… worth a try 🤷.
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).
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.
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
🤣🤣🤣
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.
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 😔.
To be fair most wifi device manufacturers are bastards and don’t publicise manuals.
You can buy a external AR9271 WiFi adapter for $20 thats fully free software/free firmware.
Or switch wifi cards, have done that as well when there was no other option.
Not in 2006
If you think that’s bad, try wifi on FreeBSD
I’ve read that the only way to get usable speeds is to set your wifi device up inside a linux container.
Or to get anything past wifi 4, or to use 5ghz
It’s bullshit because there are many products on the market running freebsd with great wifi (PlayStation as one example)
Just goes to show you that permissive licenses are generally not a good thing 🤷.
Meh, I still generally prefer them. Not like everyone would be able to use the PlayStation wifi hardware anyway
Each to his own ☺️ 🤷.
Wait, what’s past 5Ghz
6ghz (wifi 6e)
Wait, actually? I have WiFi 6 at home and its on 5Ghz
set your wifi device up inside a linux container
Could you tell me how I could do that? I don’t think FreeBSD jails support anything other than the linux compatibility layer
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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.
I had similar problems at the time. It’s much better now.
Weakling, I had this issue in highschool as well when first learning Linux, I just didn’t do any of my assignments
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
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 😂.
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?
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
