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?)
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.
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.
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.
I remember that, but for Xp. Downloading a “driver pack”, pointing windows at the root of the folder, and praying.
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
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
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.
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. :-)
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.
Please get this bad boy working well on rolling release, then:
Have some respect for the classics
Yeah, you’re too young to remember the glory days 😂.
I’m old enough but it’s not the case anymore.
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!
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.
Agreed 👍.
Am I supposed to have Wifi driver issues? My laptop’s one always worked flawlessly without me having to even look at it
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 😔.
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
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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.
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?
I don’t remember if it was WPA 3 or WPA 2 Enterprise.
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.
Recently it started working, but only sometimes and for about 5 min’s and I can’t reproduce it at all.
Tried installing firmware packages?
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.
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.
You are a bad person
I accept this.
To be fair most wifi device manufacturers are bastards and don’t publicise manuals.
Fucking fuck realtek
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.
from when this shit comes from, 2000?
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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.
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.
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 😂.
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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.
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?
Windows shipped with said driver.
eh, next time pay linux owners and spare a reboot :D
Phew. For a second there I thought the book would be about Bluetooth in Linux.
This is the real problem.
Extremely outdated, but would still work with fingerprint sensors or NFC readers
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
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)
Wait, what’s past 5Ghz
6ghz (wifi 6e)
Wait, actually? I have WiFi 6 at home and its on 5Ghz
Yeah 6e (not 6) utilises 6ghz
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 ☺️ 🤷.
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
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.
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.
New distros have all this built in. Just use endeavouros or something if u really want the good stuff
well endoevouros is just arch and the nvidia-dkms package just works for currently supported cards (I think 9 series and newer)
Endeavouros worked out of the box though, so for new users I’d recommend it over arch. It even worked with my Nvidia prime gpu
I put my comment there meaning like any arch based distro should just work
