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Comment by icambron | Hacker News Reader

One of a handful reasons I don't have Linux on my laptop anymore, even though I like so many things about Linux so much more. I'm not sure about this point, though:

> Connection time. I dislike OS X pretty deeply and think that many of its technical merits are way overblown, but it's got one thing going for it; it connects to an AP fast.

I remember Linux being slow (and unreliable) at this, but OSX is pretty slow too, at least on my MBP. The OS that I've always had the best experience just with connecting to APs is actually Windows.

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This is one of the reasons I've stopped running Linux 'bare metal' and have instead always just used an OS with good drivers to serve as a VM host. Every time I fire up a Linux VM it makes me feel a little guilty (after all, if everyone does what I'm doing there's essentially 0 reason for hardware providers to think about Linux drivers), but I've consigned myself to the fact that Linux's server roots are always going to show.

I do the same thing. No reason to feel guilty about it, not that I can see; indeed, when freed of the hardware compatibility issues that it just can't handle, Linux really shines.

Which MBP do you have?

It's fast on Apple products because they 'cheat', and re-use the last-given DHCP address.

http://cafbit.com/entry/rapid_dhcp_or_how_do (and the follow up, http://cafbit.com/entry/rapid_dhcp_redux)

Essentially, they behave as if they've spent the last (however long you were offline) without sending any packets. If their lease is still valid, they should still be able to use the same IP address; i.e., they shouldn't need to re-acquire one. That's not always the case, so they also do a DHCP request along with that.

I have a late 2012 13". It usually takes ~8 seconds to connect to an AP. Seems to depend on the AP and anecdotally it's very sensitive to the wireless channel. Maybe I just have a bad card or something.

I have found that the MacBook Pro's speed at connecting is dependent on the AP. My MBP connects to my work APs quickly, but it has issues with my home AP. Sometimes the connection to my home AP gets dropped for no reason, and when I try to reconnect it refuses to let me back on, claiming my password is incorrect. My MBP is the only device I own that has this problem (even my iPhone doesn't have this issue)

I've noticed that on my OSX macbook the connection time is slow, but it seems to connect before you log in if it's asleep. I think Apple uses tricks like this to make it seem much faster.

I'm running Archlinux from a flash stick on a cheap Haswell Celeron. From BIOS to chromium/wifi on is about 20-30 seconds. And I'm using connman so it could be faster with directly using wpa_supplicant/dhcpcd. On Windows it took up to two 2 minutes. So it is definitely an issue with hardware and drivers not Linux in general. Also using old hardware (including old wifi dongles) is a recipe for headaches. A cheap Haswell laptop or a desktop coupled with Linux friendly wifi dongle or a card should work fine.

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