Absolutely not outdated.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.
Outdated for Linux Intel, still valid for Broadcom, probably not so bad for somewhat recent Realtek and AMD/Mediatek (last I’ve read is that Mediatek WiFi hardware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).
I can absolutely confirm it’s still valid for Realtek. I had one using the RTL8812AU chipset that basically no kernel version nor distro provided out of the box, so I constantly had to download a third-party driver from Github and manually patch it via dkms, or use a third-party repository containing the driver package… and then the driver broke so badly that it wouldn’t let me update at all unless I uninstalled it, which left me without the internet I needed to actually update, effectively leaving me unable to update until I could buy another one from Mediatek that’s compatible.
And said Mediatek wifi is really slow, so I just went from the frying pan into the fire…
I can absolutely confirm it’s still valid for Realtek. I had one using the RTL8812AU chipset
Yeah, and I was explicitly writing about recent chips. RTL8812AU isn’t recent. The very latest Windows driver is from 2018, so the chip itself was released a good while before that.
I know exactly what you had to go through because I had to do the same with mine a couple of years ago but since then for newer chips Realtek started contributing to Linux itself:
I installed linux on a new pc 2 days ago, had no problem with the wifi drivers.
I don’t know if it’s the fact that the wifi is integrated on the motherboard, but it was up and running without any tweeking from me (unlike windows)
But was the cause the Linux driver or the hardware? If the fault is the hardware and the experience on Linux is the same as on Windows, it’s feature parity.
If in doubt, get an Intel WiFi card. Even in otherwise not upgradeable notebooks those are usually not soldered on. Also whatever is in a Steam Deck OLED looks like a good pick.
Does Intel sell wifi cards that use USB rather than PCI slots? My motherboard doesn’t have the slot for a wifi PCIe card, and I’ve only seen Intel sell those :/
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.
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.
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.
Outdated for
LinuxIntel, 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.
I can absolutely confirm it’s still valid for Realtek. I had one using the RTL8812AU chipset that basically no kernel version nor distro provided out of the box, so I constantly had to download a third-party driver from Github and manually patch it via dkms, or use a third-party repository containing the driver package… and then the driver broke so badly that it wouldn’t let me update at all unless I uninstalled it, which left me without the internet I needed to actually update, effectively leaving me unable to update until I could buy another one from Mediatek that’s compatible.
And said Mediatek wifi is really slow, so I just went from the frying pan into the fire…
Yeah, and I was explicitly writing about recent chips. RTL8812AU isn’t recent. The very latest Windows driver is from 2018, so the chip itself was released a good while before that.
I know exactly what you had to go through because I had to do the same with mine a couple of years ago but since then for newer chips Realtek started contributing to Linux itself:
USB tethering your WiFi-connected phone would have worked as stop gap just as well. I had to do that a lot.
I installed linux on a new pc 2 days ago, had no problem with the wifi drivers. I don’t know if it’s the fact that the wifi is integrated on the motherboard, but it was up and running without any tweeking from me (unlike windows)
In my cause it was actually a newer type of Realtek chip. 😞
But was the cause the Linux driver or the hardware? If the fault is the hardware and the experience on Linux is the same as on Windows, it’s feature parity.
If in doubt, get an Intel WiFi card. Even in otherwise not upgradeable notebooks those are usually not soldered on. Also whatever is in a Steam Deck OLED looks like a good pick.
It was the driver, now that support is provided by the kernel it is rock-solid.
Realtek upstreamed their drivers in 2020 or 2021. I got rid of my last notebook with Realtek hardware for unrelated reasons.
Does Intel sell wifi cards that use USB rather than PCI slots? My motherboard doesn’t have the slot for a wifi PCIe card, and I’ve only seen Intel sell those :/
AFAIK the problem is that the chip itself was only developed with the PCI protocol in mind.
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.
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.