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Comment by amiga-workbench | Hacker News Reader

I'm so relieved to find that its not just me going crazy all this time. Its gotten so bad that I've had to install a bloody MediaTek WiFi card in my ThinkPad just to make it work reliably.

I remember when the 8000 series radios were the gold standard for mobile wireless, all the newer AX cards have been nothing but pain and suffering.

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Ok, a weird question... is it a Mediatek MT7612U (usb dongle)?

Do you get a GPS fix nearby (~0.5m) of that card (eg. on your phone next to it)?

Due to some work i had ~6 of those dongles (Alfa AWUS036ACM), and all of them put out some noise in the gps range and break my gps connection the second they're plugged into the usb port (without any ifconfig up-ing them, setting a channel or connecting anywhere).

It's widely known that USB3 transfers produce crippling RF noise. Try a USB2 port.

MT7921 M.2 card, I've not noticed any interference, but I've also not been actively checking for that.

And Intel was the last reliable wifi chip maker I knew. What are good, well supported (on linux) wifi chipsets these days?

Try anything that's well-supported by OpenWRT. Even if you don't need support for AP mode, using a chip+driver pair that meets that standard (i.e. has mature AP mode support from an open-source driver that works on multiple architectures) usually means the client mode is also fully-supported (though maybe not Bluetooth). For 802.11ac, that generally means Qualcomm-Atheros ath10k or Mediately mt76 devices, with the latter being more popular among OEMs for use in client devices.

Is there anything that's current and supported by OpenWRT? Whilst I love OpenWRT, it's support is more on the level of it works enough to tx/rx packets and not necessarily all of the hardware functionality is enabled and works as per the specification.

"All of the hardware functionality is enabled and works as per the specification" is a pretty high bar even for proprietary drivers, especially when the hardware has just hit the market.

I think there are now a few hardware platforms capable of using the new 6GHz band channels ("WiFi 6E") on OpenWRT, but I haven't checked recently and haven't been looking to upgrade any of my hardware to support that (I'm doing just fine using 5GHz DFS channels that nobody else in my apartment building is using).

I'm not sure what hardware capabilities you think are poorly supported by OpenWRT or the open-source drivers for the known-good hardware choices from the QCA lineage or Mediatek's mt76 family. Can you provide any specifics?

> I'm not sure what hardware capabilities you think are poorly supported by OpenWRT or the open-source drivers for the known-good hardware choices from the QCA lineage or Mediatek's mt76 family. Can you provide any specifics?

I can't speak for them, but I've used OpenWRT on routers with Broadcom chipsets, so I think they were saying that OpenWRT support isn't a good litmus test for drivers that support the full functionality of the hardware they're for.

I specifically said "well-supported by OpenWRT", because even the most cursory investigation of what hardware works well with OpenWRT will warn you away from buying Broadcom.

What hardware functionality do you need that OpenWRT doesn't support?

I can only speak for myself here, but I'm running a MediaTek MT7921 on Fedora 37, I picked it up on eBay for £12 and its been spot on.

Unlike my Intel AX210 I can actually get a full gigabit down sat next to my router.

Mediatek and Qualcomm are pretty well supported afaict. Realtek is hit or miss. Broadcom should probably be avoided.

Qualcomm's Atheros descended chips are generally the best bet for Linux support, especially for use in an AP. In other words you want a chip supported by the ath10k or ath11k driver depending on which generation of wifi you want. 10k = 802.11ac, 11k = 802.11ax.

ath10k isn't current hardware, though. We used that for Google Fiber wifi back in 2015. The world now has "Wifi 6" and other such nonsense.

You could just as easily say that gigabit Ethernet isn't current, either. But gigE clearly isn't obsolete in the way a processor from the mid-2000s is obsolete, and likewise 802.11ac is still at least a few years away from being one of those radio standards that's so inefficient and outdated that it ought to be aggressively retired.

6 is ax. So as the post says, ath11k.

If it makes you feel better, I've had serious issues with AX cards on enterprise Windows ThinkPads.

> all the newer AX cards have been nothing but pain and suffering.

This is surprising for me to hear. My AX201 hasn't given me any trouble at all, ever. Maybe I've been getting lucky.

I've had I think the same AX card in two different laptops.

The thinkpad had lots of issues especially with 5G, firmware lockups, iwlwifi getting the kernel stuck etc.

The LG is rock-solid, no problems at all.

Either they are not the same card, or there are issues in the interplay of these cards with certain hardware.

Hey same! My last minipc had intel, and it was so bad I just ran it in 2.4ghz mode.

My latest one has an MTK chip by no choice of my own, and it works fantastic. Shame on Intel.

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