The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi • Hacker News Board

Re: The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi

#41

Post by ZeroGravitas » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 7:08 PM UTC

sandGorgon wrote: post #27

Copy paste, printing and networking. Biggest usability misses of Linux. I don't consider these technical issues...but usability issues. Things like insisting on keeping the install ISO at 750 mb, leaves seamless driver support out of the todo list because...hey, there are no drivers anyway. I'm really surprised there is not a paid version of Linux with these features baked in. I would GLADLY pay for all these (as wel…

There are no royalties for Flash. Well, apart from the yearly cap that Adobe pays.

Similarly, Fluendo have been paying the cap for MP3 decoding since 2005 on their open source decoder for Linux.

(MP3 decode should now be out of patent, as should most encode tasks but "intellectual property" likes to keep its boundary lines as vague as possible so you never know if you're trespassing and just pay out of fear/habit.)

Printing has also been pretty good for a while, so much so that Apple adopted the same solution in 2002.

Are you sure your complaints are still valid?

Re: The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi

#42

Post by liveoneggs » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 7:08 PM UTC

pasbesoin wrote: post #30

I recently helped a relative move an old Win XP machine to Ubuntu. I was going to move them to Lubuntu; however, the USB WiFi dongle they are using refused to cooperate -- or rather, the Lubuntu live disk I was testing refused to cooperate with it. The dongle's chipset was Linux friendly and had apparently worked without major problems up to about Ubuntu 10.10 or so. Google revealed the eruption of numerous reports o…

You can probably fix your display issue with xvidtune

Re: The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi

#43

Post by shmerl » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 7:10 PM UTC

I never was able to make my Ralink based card (D-Link DWA-160) to work on 802.11n band. It only works with b/g. I suspect it's a driver limitation (rt2800usb), but I never got any response from the developers about it.

Re: The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi

#44

Post by makomk » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 7:10 PM UTC

pasbesoin wrote: post #30

I recently helped a relative move an old Win XP machine to Ubuntu. I was going to move them to Lubuntu; however, the USB WiFi dongle they are using refused to cooperate -- or rather, the Lubuntu live disk I was testing refused to cooperate with it. The dongle's chipset was Linux friendly and had apparently worked without major problems up to about Ubuntu 10.10 or so. Google revealed the eruption of numerous reports o…

If it's a VGA monitor you probably need to hit the auto-adjust button on it. Different graphics cards and drivers produce slightly different timings for the same mode, so the monitor has to compensate, and it only adjusts its setting when you first get it or explicitly tell it to.

Re: The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi

#45

Post by virtue3 » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 7:11 PM UTC

dublinben wrote: post #13

nine_k wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android is open-source. I suppose that these workarounds would make it into the mainline kernel if they existed.

>Android is open-source. But none of the WiFi drivers of Android devices are. If they've found an improved way to do WiFi, it's baked into the proprietary drivers.

Coming from a guy that worked on pre-production android hardware... you wouldn't want any of those drivers. Ever.

Seriously.

They don't even properly report the cell signal levels correctly half the time (.... like returning -1 always on the error correction signal level...).

Re: The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi

#46

Post by danudey » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 7:13 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #37

icambron wrote: post #15

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…

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.

Re: The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi

#47

Post by DCKing » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 7:14 PM UTC

tormeh wrote: post #24

dublinben wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Android is open-source. But none of the WiFi drivers of Android devices are. If they've found an improved way to do WiFi, it's baked into the proprietary drivers.

And as long as our computers don't come with Linux preinstalled it will continue to be this way. This is what happens when your OS is a stranger in a strange land; it doesn't feel like it belongs there.

If desktop Linux ever became popular enough for computers to come with it preinstalled, it would immediately go down the binary blob driver path that Android is on.

For vendors, the reasons to close up their drivers would be identical whatever OS their kernel drivers would run on top.

Re: The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi

#48

Post by pwnna » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 7:15 PM UTC

sandGorgon wrote: post #27

Copy paste, printing and networking. Biggest usability misses of Linux. I don't consider these technical issues...but usability issues. Things like insisting on keeping the install ISO at 750 mb, leaves seamless driver support out of the todo list because...hey, there are no drivers anyway. I'm really surprised there is not a paid version of Linux with these features baked in. I would GLADLY pay for all these (as wel…

Why is copy-paste broken? I never had issues.

I don't have issues anymore with printing and networking. I understand that this stuff is per vendor so I usually do my research before buying (I have thinkpads, and my printers are all pretty friendly). I do see many windows computer fall over when printers connect to new wireless networks, though.

As for mp3, flash, isn't is as simple as enabling a non-free repository and let it do its thing? If you use Ubuntu the option to enable that is right at the installer. I've never had the issue since I switched to Linux full time (11.04)

Re: The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi

#49

Post by phunge » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 7:16 PM UTC

captainmuon wrote: post #2

One problem is that WiFi is completely opaque, especially but not only on Linux. You get no low-level and no debugging information. It just connects and you get some bars, or it doesn't. I never know where to start when debugging a bad connection, and I wouldn't know where to start if I wanted to improve Linux WiFi. For example, sometimes I can see a network, but can't connect. Why? I'd like to see something like "se…

I've wondered the same thing. Up until now I've avoided digging deep into my issues -- I've never found good docs, googling leads you to misleading forum posts and generally had bad signal-to-noise, and the WiFi stack is nested so deep that it requires a lot of knowledge. But I guess I assumed that the underlying stuff was generally correct and written by experts in the field. Maybe it's time a motivated layman like me dug in and started asking dumb questions.

Re: The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi

#50

Post by fragmede » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 7:16 PM UTC

ploxiln wrote: post #11

I stopped using NetworkManager years ago, I just use wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd directly (well I use the systemd services for these so they're started automatically). I also always name the 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks differently, and connect explicitly to the one I want. Yes it would be great if NetworkManager did the right things automatically, but the task might be impossible due to hardware and driver quirks. WiFi ch…

If you haven't used Network Manager in years, I'd suggest taking another look. It (like PulseAudio) was shipped far too early, souring early-adopters on its use.

Later kernels have (somewhat) cleaned up the wireless driver interface so these days I don't have problems with day-to-day usage of Network Manager.