If you want to scream, try wifi drivers on BSD!
Isn’t the main problem that most of them are proprietary, so they can’t be shipped automatically if you want to avoid shipping a distro with proprietary software?
The proprietary stuff is shipped as “firmware” (even though that’s not always the case) allongside the distro’s kernel. My best guess is that some distro out there (Ubuntu most probably) has obtained permission from a bunch of manufacturers to ship this “firmware” allongside it’s kernel. The rest of the distro’s are just riding this train, repackaging the firmware packages (if they can do it and redistribute it, why can’t we 🤷).
I might be mistaken, but this is the only thing that makes sense to me. Maybe it’s a semi-coordinated joint effor as well, like someone obtains permission to share firmware, writes to a bunch of maintainers and devs that “this and this” binary blob is free for redistribution and it gets picked up by most popular distros out there.
Funny that my brand new laptop just arrived today and its own wifi card wasn’t recognized in Windows, so I had to use my phone via usb-tethering. It’s a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 (14APU8) by the way, Ryzen 7th gen, full AMD, OLED etc. It came without any OS (no way I’m paying for Windows lol) and my first Win11 experience on this laptop was “please choose a network to continue” and no networks were displayed at all, because wifi card had no drivers (Realtek btw). Windows setup wouldn’t let me continue without a network, but there was no way to have a network. Funny Win11 moment right there. After some hours configuring everything I then installed my usual dual-boot Fedora and everything worked even in the live-usb. This meme is not valid for Linux anymore. Windows however, now thats a meme.
Trust me, it is. There is some obscure hardware out there. Plus, a lot of us still use hardware that was late XP time released and ndiswrapper was still around. So, for some of these cards, there is still no drivers for Linux (or buggy/unstable ones).
I understand, but seeing this post right after my experience today was the biggest coincidence ever and kinda funny that it worked right away in Linux while in Windows I had to manually go get the drivers for it. Linux used to be bad, but it evolved A LOT in terms of drivers support while windows just kinda stayed the same. I remember facing the same problem of booting a new Windows install and having the wifi option completely gone (no drivers) in Windows 8… many years ago. Windows 11 and the experience is still the same. And it’s a modern Realtek card, not even close to being obscure. This post + this experience today was just a nice internet moment
Linux used to be bad, but it evolved A LOT in terms of drivers support while windows just kinda stayed the same.
Agree on that part. It has gotten a lot better.
Still, I was hoping that they’ll eventually solve some of the problems with the WiFi hardware back in the ndiswrapper days. As it turns out, it’s 50/50. Some of it has drivers, some don’t. Sure I could go hunting for untested unreliable alpha stage drivers and compile them myself, but I was kinda hoping that we would be passed that on over 95, 96% of the hardware there is out there.
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
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
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.
