• AVincentInSpace@pawb.socialEnglish
    1181·
    7 months ago

    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…

      • remotelove@lemmy.ca
        221·
        7 months ago

        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.

        • 0x4E4F@infosec.pubOPEnglish
          62·
          7 months ago

          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?)

        • quantumantics@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          7 months ago

          Same, flashbacks to being in college trying to get Wi-Fi working in Fedora on my laptop and then struggling to get it to work with my uni’s new Wi-Fi system. Frustrating, but a great learning experience as you said.

    • Vqhm@lemmy.world
      21·
      7 months ago

      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…

      • DannyBoy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        12·
        7 months ago

        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.

        • AtariDump@lemmy.world
          2·
          7 months ago

          I remember that, but for Xp. Downloading a “driver pack”, pointing windows at the root of the folder, and praying.

      • bjorney@lemmy.ca
        4·
        7 months ago

        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

          • bjorney@lemmy.ca
            1·
            7 months 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

            • Cenzorrll@lemmy.world
              1·
              7 months ago

              I recall jaunty jackalope being the Ubuntu version that became my full time os. It was that version that my IBM x31 had everything taken care of on install with the third party drivers checked. I feel like the LTS version following that was where you could buy a generation previous of any hardware and it’d work without much fuss.

            • be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social
              01·
              7 months ago

              When I bought my laptop i was using windows and didn’t research Linux compatibility :(

              I apologize for my general grumpiness this morning. Totally reasonable. :-)

              And yup. A decade ago was when Linux turned a corner on the wifi driver front, 11 years ago was hell

              I lol’d. :-)

    • SorryQuick@lemmy.ca
      7·
      7 months ago

      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.

  • JCreazy@midwest.socialEnglish
    421·
    7 months ago

    All my Wi-Fi just works on any machine I have Linux on. But yeah years ago this was not the case.

    • Wugmeister@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      9·
      7 months ago

      Mine doesn’t work. Definitely linux’s fault that I destroyed its wifi giblets while moving my PC a bit too aggressively

      • Chobbes@lemmy.world
        14·
        7 months ago

        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!

        • pistapopper@lemm.ee
          2·
          7 months ago

          There’s this one Bluetooth speaker with a microphone that I have, that I had hoped to use for calls, that has just refused to work. Spent hours trying to get them to work but had to admit defeat. But yes, things have improved significantly.

  • akatsukilevi@kbin.social
    30·
    7 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

    • be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social
      11·
      7 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)

  • uis@lemmy.world
    30·
    7 months ago

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

  • linuxdweeb@lemm.ee
    323·
    7 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
      167·
      7 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·
        7 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
      31·
      7 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.

    • Mr3Sepz@feddit.de
      31·
      7 months ago

      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

          • 0x4E4F@infosec.pubOPEnglish
            31·
            7 months ago

            If the card supports at least WPA2, it should support WPA2 Enterprise as well. Only cards manufactured in the last few years support WPA3. I doubt they would enforce WPA3 only.

    • chaogomu@kbin.social
      12·
      7 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
      4·
      7 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
      3·
      7 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.

      • 0x4E4F@infosec.pubOPEnglish
        65·
        7 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
          41·
          7 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·
            7 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 😂.

      • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
        1·
        7 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.

    • s_s@lemmy.one
      11·
      7 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.

  • Zoidberg@lemm.ee
    23·
    7 months ago

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

    • PeWu@lemmy.ml
      4·
      7 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

      • AVincentInSpace@pawb.socialEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        What display manager do you use? I have not been able to get Howdy to work without also typing my password with SDDM

  • weirdwallace75@lemmy.worldEnglish
    182·
    7 months ago

    There are whole-ass companies selling laptops with Linux preinstalled now. They work. Even with Bluetooth.

    • spikespaz@programming.dev
      61·
      7 months ago

      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.

    • 0x4E4F@infosec.pubOPEnglish
      64·
      7 months ago

      They’re too expensive. Plus some people buy a lot of their IT equipment second hand.

  • SimplyTadpole@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    15·
    7 months ago

    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 :/