Wifi has been working out of the box for close to 20 years now. On some computers with old Broadcom cards, you have to enable non-free drivers. What model are you using?
WiFi works fine if there are drivers for whatever WiFi chip you have.
Unfortunately there are no standards for OS to talk to WiFi devices like exist for many other types of hardware, so it’s not possible to make generic drivers.
Wifi and Bluetooth are pretty decent now. As far as I can tell the biggest blockers are:
* Laptop battery life. Still in the "it's fine; I get 5 hours!" stage.
* Wayland & graphics. It's still a mess. Getting there though. Probably will be ok in about 5 years I'd guess.
* RAM management. I don't know why nobody cares about this but when Mac or Windows run low of RAM I don't even notice. With Linux it either hard freezes and reboots, or hard freezes for like 5 minutes and then kills a completely random program. How is that ok? My solution here was to upgrade both my computers to 128 GB of RAM, but that isn't really a viable option today!
* Generally bugginess. Both KDE and Gnome are just not as rock solid as Windows 11. I know I'll get downvoted for this but I haven't experienced a single crash on Windows 11 (and no ads or bloatware because I did research and used the LTSC edition). In KDE, much as I love it, the taskbar crashes regularly and I cannot make head nor tail of the completely random order it wants to put windows in. You can't even drag them into a sensible order. Gnome was not much better.
Still KDE is a lot better now than it was in the kidney bean days so I reckon in another 5 years it will probably be pretty solid too.
> Agreed, since I switched to Linux, I am getting regular OOM on my 16GB laptop.
Fwiw, when I had a 16GB Linux laptop I upgraded it to 32GB, enabled zram and a ton of swap. That improved things a bit (but didn't completely solve the issue).
Wifi has been working out of the box for close to 20 years now. On some computers with old Broadcom cards, you have to enable non-free drivers. What model are you using?
WiFi works fine if there are drivers for whatever WiFi chip you have.
Unfortunately there are no standards for OS to talk to WiFi devices like exist for many other types of hardware, so it’s not possible to make generic drivers.
Did you forget your WiFi password?
Wifi and Bluetooth are pretty decent now. As far as I can tell the biggest blockers are:
* Laptop battery life. Still in the "it's fine; I get 5 hours!" stage.
* Wayland & graphics. It's still a mess. Getting there though. Probably will be ok in about 5 years I'd guess.
* RAM management. I don't know why nobody cares about this but when Mac or Windows run low of RAM I don't even notice. With Linux it either hard freezes and reboots, or hard freezes for like 5 minutes and then kills a completely random program. How is that ok? My solution here was to upgrade both my computers to 128 GB of RAM, but that isn't really a viable option today!
* Generally bugginess. Both KDE and Gnome are just not as rock solid as Windows 11. I know I'll get downvoted for this but I haven't experienced a single crash on Windows 11 (and no ads or bloatware because I did research and used the LTSC edition). In KDE, much as I love it, the taskbar crashes regularly and I cannot make head nor tail of the completely random order it wants to put windows in. You can't even drag them into a sensible order. Gnome was not much better.
Still KDE is a lot better now than it was in the kidney bean days so I reckon in another 5 years it will probably be pretty solid too.
> * Laptop battery life. Still in the "it's fine; I get 5 hours!" stage.
Not on ARM, though! Getting 8-10h here easily.
> * RAM management
Agreed, since I switched to Linux, I am getting regular OOM on my 16GB laptop.
> Agreed, since I switched to Linux, I am getting regular OOM on my 16GB laptop.
Fwiw, when I had a 16GB Linux laptop I upgraded it to 32GB, enabled zram and a ton of swap. That improved things a bit (but didn't completely solve the issue).
yes