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…
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
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.
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.
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?)
If you want to scream, try wifi drivers on BSD!
Mhm… have tried it… not gonna try it again… gave up after 3 days, went back to Linux.
All my Wi-Fi just works on any machine I have Linux on. But yeah years ago this was not the case.
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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.
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.
This is definitely a meme for AntiqueMemesRoadshow lol
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.
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)
Phew. For a second there I thought the book would be about Bluetooth in Linux.
ReviOS for the Windows user. It’s not a OS, but a collection of scripts which convert Windows in what it should have been.
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 :)
Yeah, that occured to me. thank you.good looking out, friend. I accept your offer!
Apologies for not having seen this until now, if you are still wondering and haven’t found the tool yourself, you can launch it by opening a windows terminal as admin and typing
irm christitus.com/win | iexas soon as chocolatey is installed a gui will launch allowing you to easily install common software, uninstall bloat, apply tweaks (such as disabling telemetry), and control windows updates. It’s a great one stop shop for setting up any fresh/existing windows install, and is continuously updated with reliable and transparent documentation.
If you would prefer a video about the tool, the latest one is here: https://youtu.be/GQBRrVGgB_Q
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/GQBRrVGgB_Q
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Thank you kind internet stranger! ❤️
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…
Well, yes. I wasn’t really intending to make a comparison. I was just explaining the meme. There was a time when getting your wifi/network card going in Linux was somewhat of a hassle for many.
Windows 10 comes with generic drivers for network capabilities preinstalled. It isn’t Windows 7 anymore.
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
Allright. You’ve convinced me not to give up.
And that Rick Roll song perfectly sums up how I personally think of Linux. I will not be giving it up. And I will not be saying goodbye.
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
