Comment by znpy
1 day ago
> They were already painfully slow when they were new
Mostly, yes. I had an acer aspire one d250 (similar specs to that in the article) and i worked mostly okay under linux for light development work, meaning i was in high school doing java development with emacs and running apache ant by hand.
Other than that yeah they were painfully slow.
Also i bought a similar machine at a flea market for like 20€ and was sorely disappointed to find out it had a Broadcom wifi chip which is a pain to work with and i’m not really interested in buying an atheros card for another 20€.
The default wifi in almost all of the laptops and netbooks of the time sucked. It wasn't unique to netbooks. Especially for linux (I don't mean only not supporting promiscuous mode if you were in need of network troubleshooting tools; I mean many drivers weren't supported out of the box. If you forgot to download a driver rpm/deb file before installing, good luck. Etc.)
The external network card support was better than macbooks' though. Go figure.
ndiswrapper was the bane of my existence.
> The default wifi in almost all of the laptops and netbooks of the time sucked. It wasn't unique to netbooks.
Not really. Proper laptops had intel centrino wifi which worked decently well with binary blobs and atheros cards needed no binary blob at all and worked out of the box.
The iwlwifi contrib drivers still require manual installation. It's about the license model. I used to have an external Atheros just to set up my other NICs (internal and external). It wasn't great for much other than that.