I just ran into this issue Christmas Eve. Kennel didn't support the Netgear A6200 dongle I had, and I couldn't build the community made drivers for it. Was up until 3AM trying to solve it, before giving up and buying a longer Ethernet cable.
I was up until about 3am Christmas Eve trying to get Wi-Fi drivers to work on a Linux gaming computer for the kids. Dec 26th I bought a new Ethernet cable instead of taking my chances with another Wi-Fi dongle.
Luckily I'm mostly on intel wireless these days so I have less of that flavor of pain.
I don't wanna talk about the horrific abyss that is pipewire on intel hardware though. It takes some massive evil to convince me that pulseaudio is the lesser of the two.
My dad wanted to try something other than Ubuntu. I tried to explain him what a living hell compiling your own wifi drivers from source it is on other platforms. Thankfully he hasn’t switched.
Me in 200x, bought a mac laptop, installed linux on it cause "need it for java dev".
Wifi not visible in kernel:
all internet: "This one is easy, encapsulating windows driver with wine works perfectly for this chipset, so no linux specific driver developped"
me: "I'm on a PowerPC, not an x86"
Honest question to whomever- is it as bad as the meme implies? I know its better just from reading replies here but im genuinely getting ready to dive into Linux next year as my daily driver and posts like these scare me.
It used to be like that in the past for some models/brands but is more a hardware/kernel developer thing. Nevertheless, with a live usb you can always have a look on your preferred distro before installing it. Check Ventoy.
Had the issue with a Mac Pro from 2013 - Fedora and Manjaro didn‘t work from the scratch and needed some tweaking. Broadcom doesn’t seem to be user-friendly at all 😉 !
It's way better than it used to be. I remember back in the day having to use a tool to use the windows WiFi drivers on Linux and even if it did work it was spotty.
I had to go and buy a new WiFi adapter whose drivers were actually included in the kernel. The one I had was RealTek, which didn't work on Arch out of the box but seemed to work OOB on Zorin weirdly enough.
Comments
I don't wanna talk about the horrific abyss that is pipewire on intel hardware though. It takes some massive evil to convince me that pulseaudio is the lesser of the two.
Wifi not visible in kernel:
all internet: "This one is easy, encapsulating windows driver with wine works perfectly for this chipset, so no linux specific driver developped"
me: "I'm on a PowerPC, not an x86"
yeah me and three other crazies on this planet
[Flashbacks intensify]
Nowadays it seems to just work.
Side note: I'm still checking your hostapd tut whenever I set up an AP. Posting while connected to one such, in fact. Thanks for that!! 🙏