The weird thing is that it seems to be working? Either I misdiagnosed the problem, or maybe my old one was just broken.
Could be a new firmware in the fresh one
Or simply a newer kernel version could do the trick
(cant believe Im writing this but) ever since I switched to Arch all those years ago, my Linux hardware problems ended.
Turns out Linux is great when your kernel is relatively fresh by default.
Could be flashed with a different microcode that works better with Linux. Just because it’s of the same model doesn’t mean it’s the same. Sometimes it’s as little as a flag that is set. Looking at you battleye
A different revision could be very different, it’s likely not really the exact same.
You will learn SO MUCH about computers by just trying to make your wifi or some other thing work. And then you will never have trouble with that thing again. I remember having to do wrapping of drivers, but I don’t know if that is still a thing.
This is my jam. I really enjoy having a steep hill to climb.
This is how getting unsupported features work in linux feels
Like that time I got a random no-name action cam’s webcam mode to work on Linux by manually mounting it within seconds of connecting it
write us the driver to mount it within seconds of connecting it automatically.
There’s something special about WiFi, but it is better than it used to be. I think it depends on your hardware more than anything. Any chance you can connect up to Ethernet in the meantime? You may be able to plug directly into a switch/router.
It’s too far from the router right now, but I have some options.
I needed to have the new adapter plugged in to use a tool from the manufacturer that is supposed to detect your adapter and install the most up to date driver for you, but of course you have to be online, so I was using the old semi-broken adapter and had both plugged in and connected to my router at the same time.
It seems jank, but it made me wonder what would happen if I just left both connected forever. Would it stay seamlessly connected as long as they both don’t drop at the same time? Lol
You remind me of when I moved to Argentina. I had a laptop whose fan suddenly froze but I was too broke to get a computer so I figured out that if I put it in JUST THE RIGHT spot next to a fan, it would get enough passive cooling to work. Then I did the silly and decided to upgrade, which made me have to plug in Ethernet. It took me ages to get the computer back in the right spot so that it wouldn’t power off due to overheating. All for WiFi…
Amazing. There’s a level of stubborn ingenuity that I can appreciate.
You can make Linux load balance over two network connectors, but usually it prioritizes one network adapter for all traffic based on a scoring algorithms (wired and high bandwidth gets most points).
You can manually set a priority too, or route specific traffic (based either on destination, protocol, or source program, etc) to a specific adapter. Some programs (like KTorrent) are capable of using multiple adapters without any specific config (which is why I was able to run torrents one time while literally nothing else worked with an old 3G internet dongle) .
This would be a really interesting rabbit hole to go down…
I did it once because I had an unstable cable connection, it was surprisingly easy***(for me) https://www.baeldung.com/linux/merge-several-internet-connections
Networking is wild. I’ve learned the Linux network stack by troubleshooting my Proxmox LXC + tailscale subnet router shit.
As far as first problems with Linux go, that one’s a classic! Congrats, LOL
Be me and get a cheap MacBook Pro 2015 to run Linux Has Broadcom adapter Apparently the worst one 43602 chip Proceeds to install arch anyway Tries 3 drivers, no luck Tries many workarounds, no luck Cries to sleep Runs internet recovery to install macOS, fails
Guys, listen to the wiki and techstack sites. Don’t get broadcom
This was also my first issue in Linux but it turned out my duel boot was somehow screwing things up. Windows broke WiFi for Linux, then when I booted into Windows it was broken there too. I blame Windows because it was right after a series of updates, but I have no idea why it’d impact other independent OS on other drives.
Unfortunately I forgot the solution. It was probably since bios impacting thing, like how they often say to disable fast boot and junk.
Devices are configurable via software. If windows managed to “flip a switch” on the WiFi chip, it would affect Linux as well if it didn’t reset it on boot.
This. Way back in the day, I had a sound card that would absolutely not work in one OS unless I’d already booted into a different one and “activated” it with the driver there.
It might have been Win9x and WinNT, but it could just as easily have been Win9x and some early-ish version of RedHat.
But anyway, it would not surprise me to learn that the same sort of thing still happens with some hardware.
Ahh, ok that makes sense. Reading other posts, pretty sure my wifi chip is the same as OP.
Disable fast boot in your BIOS, else when you reboot, hardware is not re-initialized so if Windows loaded a custom firmware in the chip or set some stuff here and there, it may be incompatible with linux. If you dual boot, always disable FastBoot in the BIOS.
and at this point it’s also worth noting that this is a setting in the UEFI setup, and this is different to the fast startup setting in windows that also needs to be turned off for other reasons.
Ohhh. Great PSA to some of us who start out.
I had this issue and it was a fast boot issue. I’d shut down windows and boot Linux and WiFi wouldn’t work. A restart would fix it. With fast boot, windows doesn’t actually shut down, it’s more like a hibernate state. So the driver or whatever it’s called was being held by the widows partition and wouldn’t respond to another kernal.
I think windows does shut down, but the hardware in your computer does not, and so when booting linux, the hardware does not start with a fresh slate. It’s not reinitialized, keeping configuration and possibly custom firmware from the other OS.
interestingly, it also means malware could also escape a reboot this way… and for the network adapter, maybe it doesn’t even need to be compatible with linux to work.what you mean though is the fast startup setting of windows. that does hibernate the computer as you say, after it logs out the user.
You are correct. Fast startup used to be called fast boot, hence my confusion. And it looks like the current state of windows is saved in nonvolatile for fast startup, which I would consider not being fully shutdown, but that’s probably semantics at that point.
My first Linux issue was that it didn’t support the USB hub I had at the time that was just always plugged into the windows machine I was installing Linux onto. So in 2003, I took my bulky tower to a friends house and it booted on the first try after weeks of failures trying on my own at home.
I was both relieved, and incredibly annoyed.In a pinch you can tether your phone through USB and use its Wi-Fi.
If you have an old router lying around, you might be able to set it up as a repeater and then plug into it with Ethernet. That’s what I did for a while when my computer’s Wi-Fi was unreliable.
After both the 4G modem and the wifi dongles didn’t work I decided to flash an old TP-link router with OpenWRT (or was it DDWRT?) and using that in a bridge mode connected wifi and via ethernet to the PC. So yeah, then I got an Intel wifi 6 NIC and gave the router away.
I’ve done that before, most reliable wifi connection I’ve ever had.
Hah, I’ve totally done that. I’m thinking about doing it again, because it worked way better than my desktops built-in wifi adapter that has no external antenna.
Check h-node next time ;).
starring this comment, amazing resource from the FSF - thank you!
Some distros have crusty old kernels/firmware and thus lack optimal support to boot lol.
Anyway even with Qualcomm Wi-Fi 7, it was not great even a month back. 🙄
I had to rebase to
Bazzite-Testingand back toBazzite-Stablea few times… Ended up pinning an older testing image for a while to keep working wifi while Fedora upstream fixed their crap.The joy of Atmoic made that super simple and painless I’ll say.
Rolling back updates on tradish distros can be painful to the point of reinstall sometimes lol.
I personally would avoid Wifi 7 or anything newer. It takes a while to develop kernel support and it will be a bad experience. Wifi 7 support was only finished in the last year or two and it is going to be buggy.
This.
Don’t expect the brand new gear to work on Linux. It takes a while for the neckbeards to get access and write the drivers.
Heck, even new gear from companies that contribute their own drivers can be shaky.
I’m sorry, but for desktop, Linux can’t be relied on as stable for early gear adoption. Usually even the specs are in limbo still.
This is coming from a linux/bsd only user for many years.
The vast majority of hardware is support maintained by the manufacturer. However, it takes quite a while for it to trickle down. Linux is purely a monothic kernel so bugs can be very bad.
Ironically, I haven’t had a hardware issue in ages.
yup, same problems with v4l and a kernel incongruency. NixOS to the rescue. Add a line to pin the kernel and everything keeps working like nothing ever happened.
Intel WiFi. End of discussion.
@the_q @The_Picard_Maneuver reminder that intel ax series does not work with ax and even ac normally in most regions
Yep. Got an Intel AX210 Typhoon Peak in my (AMD) laptop. Never had a single issue. Their CPUs might be crap, but their wifi is the business.
Their WiFi cards were great until they “fixed” them to only work with recent Intel CPUs.
ath9k or bust
Oops no WAP mode either
I have a USB wifi adapter for that reason
My work machine has an intel WiFi chip and it’s given me nothing but trouble
Or Qualcomm or MediaTek
mediatek?
Realtek. I was reading that many Realtek chipsets cause intermittent wifi drops, and that since they’re pretty inexpensive, it’s simpler to just get one that works. So, I went with another company that advertises as Linux compatible out of the box, plugged it in, checked it with ‘lsusb’, and saw the exact same Realtek chipset that my old one has.
Realtek is just ass in general. I avoid them like the plague.
They’re OK in windows, but I have never had a good experience with them on Linux.
It sounds like you’re not alone, and it’s what I was trying to do too! I just didn’t pay close enough attention to the specs on my new adapter, lol
Lesson learned.
Did the new adapter have the same problems? I know you said it read as the same.
So far… nope. I need to test it some more, but I’m just waiting for it to start happening again.
Realtek cards are trash on BSD too.
FreeNAS was my first experience with that…
After dealing with that for a month I swore I’ll never buy a nother PC with a realtek nic. I think I spent like $50-100 more on my latest mobo in order to get Intel + Marvell instead of Realtek.
Especially wired
Ask me how I know
Asus motherboard?
Not sure if you have the same problem or not, but I had intermittent jitter spikes (and/or complete package drops) every 60 seconds on my Realtek chipset, ran:
sudo iw dev wlan0 set power_save offAnd it’s been stable since (just had to make a udev rule to make it persistent across boot)
If I catch the new one doing it, this is going to be the first thing I try. Thanks
Is it a pretty new machine?
No, very old. A lot of the hardware is from 2013.
Realtek only started to develop drivers in the upstream Linux kernel relatively recently, 5 years or so, and only for what was then the newest chipset. Something 88 and two letters but not 88 and other letters (I think CE).
Does Intel WIFI still exist? If so, that is what is probably the best supported chipset.
Realtek stuff tends to be junk in my experience (even outside of support which is terrible)
I have a Mediatek MT7921K, it’s using the mt7921e driver, 3 years ago the chip was new I think and not well supported in linux (problem with init/sleep/resume) but a lot of people fixed it, and mediatek released new firmware, and the driver is rock solid for about 3 years now, I’m using it on my daily driver working PC 8h/day, 0 problem, and use a BLE keyboard and trackball too.
Yeah that’s why I was wondering if their machine was fairly new. I’ve found consistently better driver support with time. I’m genuinely surprised that its an older machine and having these issue.
Are all mediatek’s horrible? I’ve got one in my desktop but it’s just terrible. Randomly crashes my whole pc after a while. And the only way to fix it is to cmos reset the motherboard. It’s forever disabled in the bios now, which also means no Bluetooth sadly. Just wondering if I had bad luck or to always avoid them.
I’ve had good experience with them especially on OpenWRT
Basically yes.
But thankfully they are equal-opportunity ass and suck on all platforms, not just Linux. I’m on bazzite rn because I couldnt get the bluetooth on either fedora OR ubuntu to work at full speed. Granted, my machine is very new, but like. I’m still getting that occasional issue where a bt device connects and the whole system lags.
I gave up on the built-in mediatek wifi chip in my motherboard and just pulled the dedicated wifi card from my old pc. I’m on ethernet now, but man troubleshooting that was not fun.
I even ordered a new chip, which, of course, never showed up.
As someone that spent a lot of years sitting next to an IT help desk, I’m not sure any chipsets work well at all. A lot of times you just have to figure out what makes them happy and get used to it.
I’d hear things like “as long as I don’t close my laptop after I undock, i don’t have to reboot to fix the wifi” as the person waddled across the office propping their laptop open. And these were high end windows laptops.
If you want to save troubleshooting time, just skip straight to the blood sacrifice. Computers are happy when you bleed, for some reason.
