My wifi card has been in the bugs section of almost every major Linux distro for the past 4 years since an update. Tried almost every solution i could find. nothing helped. couldn't use it with it's unstable speed and disconnections. So much for open source and GNU/shit and fix it yourself crap. Do you really expect me to learn to write a wifi driver? I'm done with Linux. Installed Windows and everything was fine. open source software may be good but not the best. Much better to use proprietary software than to waste time trying solutions from the seventh page of google search results.

People fanboy Linux. And I get it. It's refreshing to work it on occasion. But sometimes I need to spend time working on coding software and not worrying about my environment/stack not being immediately compatible with the tools I need to use.

Don't blame the open source community, they can only work from the documentation they get, guessing the hardware or reverse engineering.

Blame the hardware manufacturer for not providing drivers and/or documentation for their hardware.
They could make drivers for Linux as well as Windows, but most don't do it.
And if there are drivers, they are often shitty implementations which lots of bugs.

Additionally, there are often hardware changes, although the product name stays the same, especially on cheap devices. So the open source community is always running behind it.

Luckily there are exceptions from this rule, like Intel, who provide Linux drivers for most of their products.

@ddephor it worked fine before the kernel version got updated so it can't be the the hardware manufacturer's fault right?

@firefish I had and still have this issue with mint updated my kernel and it broke my WiFi adapter so I had to revert, can't update it until my adapter gets support otherwise I shouldn't bother with internet on my laptop which is not ideal since I need documentation and be able to push to my git repo. I tried a dozen random solutions specific to my WiFi adapter as well but nothing seem to do it apart from the downgrade, you could give the forums a try and maybe reach out to someone that could help out with it. Who knows it could be something you overlooked.

I'm not a full on Linux person though, just use mint because it has no games on it this my productivity sky rockets lol

@firefish Sounds like an API change. That's bad, but still it's the hardware manufacturer who should provide the right drivers.
It's nice if the community supports your device, but they do it mostly for free, so you cannot depend on them. But you could do it yourself then, and that doesn't mean googling if someone already fixed your problem, that means changing the driver by yourself. And yes, I know what that means (I do lowlevel stuff and driver related development) and that it's nearly impossible for most developers.

Thats just true, windows:ia at least running anyhow and does its job (and since win10 its fcking performant) i got an old core 2 duo 4gb ram with win10 as little server and it got an uptime since a few months, even when my niche is playing old games on it allmost every day. Before it was Linux, games where boring, crashed once a week and drivers where missing

I completely get that. I too had driver issues numerous times.

However, there are certain toolsets that do wonders for some applications (usually proprietary stuff) that only work on *nix. And sure, Windows 10 now has a Linux subsystem which is great. But so far, that part works far better on Linux.

So I'd only suggest to watch reviews of the hardware you want to buy before buying it. Specifically see if it works well with Linux.

Because Linux ain't bad. It's just a small unaffiliated group of people trying to make what big companies with lots of money and who produce the hardware do. Which sometimes is a real bitch.

@CykloTronic86 and how many of them get money for writing WiFi drivers?

Which model wifi card and which distro?

@zmzmuazzam98 broadcom bcm43142 wifi card and all major distros(fedora,ubuntu,arch,suse,mint,manjaro)

@firefish ahh yeah.broadcom.i had major problems with my broadcom wifi card.was using lubuntu at that time.did u try the following
1) using synaptic package manager to search for 'broadcom'.there are a few packages you might have that are driver updates or installations

@zmzmuazzam98 yup tried it all. Even tried compiling from source the latest builds. The only driver available is wl which is a proprietary one and is up to date. Thanks for the effort☺