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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Fedora's bleeding-edge kernel support usually means better hardware support for newer laptops, which is great. One potential drawback, however, is the decision not to include any non-FOSS drivers in the installation package. I completely understand why they do it, but it throws a wrench into the idea of loading Linux onto a laptop and having everything "just work".

For instance, getting the Broadcom wifi card that comes with my Dell XPS 13 to work on Fedora has been such a pain in the ass (proprietary driver only) that most people recommend tearing it out and replacing it with an Intel card that has a more Linux-friendly driver.

If Redhat really wants better Linux penetration in the laptop world, at some point they're probably going to have to make a decision to either go the Linux Mint route and include proprietary drivers by default, or try to engage some of the hardware manufacturers to open-source their drivers.

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Laptop manufacturers could also just avoid this problem by using modems that don't require proprietary drivers or firmware, like those from Intel or Atheros. This is an entirely avoidable problem.

The side effect is the Intel and Atheros are better anyway, BroadCom Wifi is utter crap IMO

Android and the first wave of Netbooks with GNU/Linux prove what manufacturers actually think of it.

I debated calling out the manufacturers as well, but it seemed unfair with the example of my Dell XPS 13. The laptop is installed with Windows by default, and the Broadcom card works just fine there. The XPS 13 Developer Edition (which is pre-loaded with Ubuntu) actually takes your advice and packages an Intel wifi card instead.

Certainly they can try to push the "Sell laptops with Linux preloaded and make sure everything works" approach (because let's face it, that's pretty much the only reason why Windows laptops are pervasive), but if you're trying to increase the number of people using Linux, I'd suggest that they might get better results as the thing one uses to repurpose their existing laptop.

My XPS 13 Developer Edition has the Broadcom card, which makes it annoying to install distros. The proprietary driver has worked without problem as far as I can tell, but I'd really prefer a free driver.

(I do think it's fair to call out Dell for selling a Linux developer machine that can't even connect to the internet without proprietary drivers. There's no Ethernet port either.)

On the plus side, the retina touch screen works great. Even on my custom NixOS setup it gives me smooth scrolling and even pinch-to-zoom in Chromium Google Maps. Pretty cool.

Sorry to hear, I think your batch must have been one of the early ones. My understanding is that most DE laptops had an Intel card, particularly the models sold in Europe.

XPS13 (2016, Skylake) DE has Intel WiFi. Previous generation (2015) DE has Broadcom WiFi.

The Intel cards are nothing to write home about, either. Their only redeeming qualities are the availability of a free driver and Just Works experience in Linux. Otherwise, they are quite slow - so I understand why Dell puts Broadcom into Windows version.

Why didn't you buy the developer edition?

Because I saw someone selling a barely-used i7/8GB/512gb SSD of the non-dev edition on Craigslist for $800. Similar specs new would've been around the $2k mark.

Additionally, I was fine running Windows 10 at first and doing all my dev work in a Fedora VM, but the Anniversary Update has pissed me off considerably, leading me to want to migrate to a bare-metal Linux installation.

Oh yeah that's a great deal. :)

Just curious, what pissed you off about the Windows 10 Anniversary Update? That update hasn't made it to my PC just yet.

I think what pissed of many users was that the update messes with your settings once again, and that Cortana cannot be disabled anymore without messing around in the registry. Another point was that they forgot to turn off some debugging option they had presumably activated for their developers which opened up a big vulnerability.

I tried buying it here in EU and the local Dell distributor flatly told me that they can't procure it at all. Figure that O.o

I got one of the original XPS 13 DEs, and a friend of mine had no issues picking up the latest revision recently enough.

If you want something a bit bigger, but that just works, the E5510 is excellent, especially once you have Ubuntu 16.04.1 (or a distro with the 4.4.0 kernel) on it.

I bought the windows version, because the hw specs I wanted weren't available for the developer editions. Luckily the archlinux wiki page for the del xps 13 (2015) made me aware of the issue with Broadcom wifi, so I picked one with an Intel.

No real problems so far, except the ones that were caused by me because it was the first time I've ever set up a linux on a laptop.

I'll also give Dell some much-deserved credit for making available a full repair manual for their laptops (or at least some of them). I bought the Windows variant of the XPS 13 because Costco had the 16GB i7 model for $500 cheaper, and Dell gives you complete instructions for things like replacing the WiFi card.

Linux support isn't 100% perfect for me, by the way, but it's very usable. The main problem I still have is that power management is mediocre (I can't get it below about 8 watts idle generally), and the USB-C dongle you need for ethernet is very flaky under the current kernels. It works, but often requires unplugging and replugging for it to be recognized, and (very) occasionally completely hangs the machine a few seconds after I plug it in.

I thought you still have to load proprietary firmware onto Intel cards?

FWIW, I recall the last time that Broadcom tried engaging the Linux kernel community was back when there was an open source (b43?) Broadcom driver, it "sort of" worked if you were lucky and didn't use too complex a network setup (If I recall it'd break on certain security modes?)

Broadcom showed up suddenly, dumped a badly written set of kernel patches and then disappeared into the ether, frustrating just about everybody involved

Have you tried Arch Linux? The install experience is quite bare metal, but once you're past that, the experience is very smooth. Thus far, I've installed it on five machines (three laptops) with varying hardware and had only one hardware issue (and even then only with the boot CD, where I had to add nomodeset to the boot parameters).

On second thought, I have also had a few issues back when I thought BTRFS would be a good idea. (It's not). Those were my own fault, though.

> For instance, getting the Broadcom wifi card that comes with my Dell XPS 13 to work on Fedora has been such a pain in the ass (proprietary driver only) that most people recommend tearing it out and replacing it with an Intel card that has a more Linux-friendly driver.

If your laptop has enough ports, you could actually buy a USB wifi dongle for ~3$.

You could try Korora, which is a Fedora-fork with goal of making it more user-friendly, so that includes easier access to proprietary drivers.

https://kororaproject.org/

Funny you should mention Korora:

https://kororaproject.org/support/engage/question/upgrade-li...

But both of my issues were not specifically Korora's fault, so no biggie. I love the distro otherwise.

Broadcom is useful if you want to have a hackintosh partition as well. I run Mint/Win7/Win10/OSX on a single QHD+ ultrabook with 1TB M.2 SSD, no WiFi issues under Mint (I am typing this using it right now).

This is very strange -i have the XPS 13 with broadcom and it worked out of the box. There was some problem for a while with the BIOS that caused wifi cards to be not recognized. Can you try with a recent lived?

The Broadcom driver should work now or, at worst, in a couple weeks. I think it landed in 4.7.

Source? I've googled around but haven't located anything to that effect.

I can't easily find the commits without my laptop, but it's the brcmfmac driver. Somewhat amazingly, Broadcom wrote the patches.

Googling around, brcmfmac seems to apply to USB devices: http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43/

The one inside the XPS 9343 is BCM4352. I'm not seeing any indication of compatibility with a BCM4352 using a brcmfmac driver.

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