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Comment by karlpoppery | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for this. It's hard to understate how frustrating it is to buy multiple wifi adapters, to struggle to find the correct drivers on a some github repo and to have all of them randomly stop working every six months. I gave up and bought a long ethernet cable.

This problem is one of the main reason I wouldn't recommend having Linux as an OS for a personal PC.

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It would be better to choose from OpenBSD's list, as that hardware is likely more open. Ralink and Realtek have been described as particularly friendly (if memory serves me).

However, OpenBSD also supports older adapters that Linux has long abandoned, so choose something recent.

https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq6.html#Wireless

I am using a Realtek with Centos, and it's never been a problem.

Edit:

Avoid these - "There are not very many major vendors left. Just a few closed ones (TI ACX100/111, Connexant PrismGT, Broadcom crud)."

https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20050317205152

interesting on the openbsd list.

my nightmare are from some "edimax" which uses realtek under the hood; then realtek stops updating said driver such that I have to watch N number of repos every time there's a kernel update (or months later) => and then end up find yet-another-repo with some latest-n-greatest fixes; kind of sad. Makes me want to say: Go away wifi, and bring my cable back.

I feel like this used to be a bigger issue, now virtually all motherboards have an M.2 A/E key slot for a wifi card and the Intel ones are pretty bulletproof and dirt cheap, in my experience.

So throw out the one the motherboard comes with and buy one to replace it?

I mean, my experience has been that they tend to come with ones that have good support, but I accept this may be a lack of familiarity with the low end of the market, although given how cheap the Intel ones are, I'd suspect the low end is more likely to just not ship one than ship a bad one.

Most modern low end boards don't have this. And a very big chunk of desktop computers in use nowadays probably fall in the having a low end board category or being old enough for that to not be a feature. (my desktop is in the first category lol)

Fair, although given M.2 is just PCI-E, a quick search on aliexpress shows adapters for under a fiver, might be the best route to a known good option (assuming those adapters aren't problematic themselves, but they should be simple, also assuming most people have a free PCI-E slot these days, outside of ITX boards, but those not having an M.2 for wifi seem unlikely).

i'd say the usb wifi's are for the many smaller form factor motherboards lol. then there's planned obsolescence like what has happened with Dell and Intel parts; wifi industry is literally an oo-new-shiny and drop's the mic on old stuff

Fascinating to hear that, as someone who a) doesn't remember having a serious wifi problem on Linux for probably 15 years and b) has never used a wifi dongle on a non-laptop.

Wifi is a complete non-problem for me. I remember fiddling in 2004 and then using FreeBSD on a non-Lenovo, but that's it for bad experiences.

Literally no snark intended, it's just so far out of the way of what I consider normal usage. (As someone with Linux laptops, Linux servers, Windows workstations, Windows laptops in the house.)

Several of the brcmsmac-using chips have driver code that works "fine" until you push enough traffic through. Race conditions, I assume.

P.S. Never buy Broadcom.

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