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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

I have 3 Linux laptops in the house. One with Intel running Ubuntu, another with Broadcom running Fedora and the third with a Prism interface running CentOS 6. All three work flawlessly.

We also have 3 Macbooks, a white one, a Pro 13 and a Retina 13. All three work flawlessly with our Wi-fi.

My wife had a corporate-issued HP laptop running Windows 7. It connected to our wireless once or twice over a year. I had a network cable for her.

My in-laws have a Windows 7 Dell laptop. It's now running Ubuntu, booted off a USB stick. It's doing so because Windows 7 sometimes connects to the network, sometimes doesn't and I never identified a pattern, so I simply gave up. Under Ubuntu, it works flawlessly.

And yet, somehow, it's the sad state of Linux wi-fi... Go figure...

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Yeah, I haven't even so much as bothered to look at the wifi chipsets in computers that I purchase since like... 2007? Since then I just assume that it works, and so far it always has.

The only trouble I have is with this corporate T420 with Windows 7, on my home wifi network. Sometimes it takes 5+ minutes to connect (2.4ghz or 5ghz wireless-n, I have both available and it has trouble with both.)

I've also never had a single problem with NetworkManager, despite what others are saying. Then again, I've also never had problems with the infamous PulseAudio... I bought a cheap-as-hell USB audio card off the internet the other day and it Just Worked™. That didn't even surprise me.

a) Your personal anecdotes may not broadly apply.

b) Just because Windows is worse doesn't mean Linux isn't frustrating.

c) The post complains more about performance (rate, connect time, etc) and complexity (numerous overlapping components) than "Does it work at all".

> a) Your personal anecdotes may not broadly apply.

I'd say that if we were talking about a single computer, but here I have stories of 8 different computers with 8 different CPUs and 5 different wireless interfaces, radios, antennas and software all connected to a single wireless router.

If I got my numbers right, there is 81.41% chance this is not a fluke.

You have your numbers very, very wrong. You're about 10 or 11 orders of magnitude off.

I've used exclusively linux at home, for the last 6 years (except at work), and I did find that some of the nano wi-fi USB things (necessary for rPi) don't work.

Yes I have one that "works" in Linux, but it only ever connects at a glacial speed. In Windows it works at full speed as expected.

("Submit a bug", "Have you tried...", "What does [some command] say?", "It's the fault of the manufacturers" etc.)

This stuff can be tricky.

For years I was using a D-Link USB dongle with a Ralink chip to connect to my home network. At first I had to use a non-mainline driver but eventually mainline caught up. Anyway, either way, it worked pretty well without much fuss.

Then I moved to an apartment building with dozens of repeaters in it for a large university network, and my connection became unbearably slow (even though my laptop running Linux and my Android phone and tablet all worked fine) despite working OK on Windows.

So I ordered another dongle by a different manufacturer with a different chipset, which had many reviews exclaiming how well it worked on Linux. It had the same problems.

Eventually I got a PCIE Intel card and it worked splendidly, with no fiddling whatsoever.

The moral of the story is that there are a huge number of different hardware and software configurations and environments to use them in. And what's more, a configuration that works without issue in one environment can fail spectacularly in another.

> The moral of the story is that there are a huge number > of different hardware and software configurations and > environments to use them in

True, and it partly makes all these complaints valid for other OSes as well. I had major trouble with my MacBook connecting to my home wifi, until I bought a new router. No trouble anymore.

I believe it works for you, but can only say I am insanely jealous.

What do you mean "flawlessly"? What are your criteria for success? I suspect they're different from the person who wrote the submission.

The best method I found for getting a Windows 7 Dell to stop being stubborn is to restart the wireless driver.

Toggling the wireless power is less reliable than soft restarting.

Making the soft restart easy involves downloading the Windows SDK, to get a copy of DevCon, and then stuffing it into a scheduled task so that you can run it without a UAC prompt.

(I mean this more as 'surprise surprise it's the drivers' than as a defense of windows)

Win8.1 is even better, we had some colleagues change their simple DSL modems versus routers (which is better anyway, but...) because it's just not possible to use a DSL modem reliably with Win8.1!

What routers are you using?

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