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Yeah, about WiFi. I wanted to bring my desktop somewhere where I wasn't sure I'd have ethernet. "No problem," says I, "I'll just buy a USB adapter." I have 80

Yeah, about WiFi. I wanted to bring my desktop somewhere where I wasn't sure I'd have ethernet. "No problem," says I, "I'll just buy a USB adapter." I have 802.11ac in my house, and it's pretty nice, so I thought I'd get an 802.11ac adapter. So I run down to the store, and pick up an adapter that says it works on Linux ON THE BOX. I look online, and it is using the RTL8812au, which people have reported working in Linux. Turns out none of the drivers compile on Linux 4.4+. I managed to mess around with the makefiles and the code a bit to get most of the compile errors to go away, but it was still hanging on a few files that I couldn't make heads or tails of. So I went on Github and downloaded a version that had been updated to account for this device in the past 4 days. No dice. All told, I probably spent 6 hours trying to get the stupid adapter to work. I would have returned it after hour 1 and bought a more expensive Atheros or Intel adapter, but they literally only make 802.11ac adapters in the mini-pcie form factor. On one hand, the device was USB 3.0 instead of USB2, was made by Tenda (who kind of cut corners), and all the fixes were either for Ubuntu or Arch, and I'm using Fedora. On the other hand, it's 2017, 802.11ac has been out for a while now. I kind of expect to be able to find at least one 802.11AC adapter that works. Most of the 802.11ac adapters that other people had gotten working only worked in 2.4ghz mode, or only worked with 802.11n. So that was pretty disappointing. It felt like it was 2006 all over again. (It really would have felt like 2006 if Xorg had broken during this process.) It's not like I bought "outdated" hardware either. The FCC approval is dated December 19, 2016. So you'd expect the driver to compile on a recent kernel. I think I'm just going to buy an 802.11ac router, run it in client mode, and velcro it to the top of my case.

rubatuga 10y ago
I'm totally feel you on the mind-numbing latency that seems to exist with Linux drivers and any sort of semi-modern technology. It's funny you mention Xorg breaking. It's unbelievable how fragile Xorg is. I remember a decade ago booting Ubuntu for the first time and struggling to get X working with an old nvidia mobile chipset, and any single change in the terribly complex Xorg conf files would cause a failure to boot, forcing me into console mode. Looking back, Linux was quite unfriendly regarding drivers and support, but I feel it's made a lot of progress for more popular systems. It's an innate problem of Linux itself. Maybe we should focus on the systems that are certified or well-supported by Linux out-of-box like the dell xps series, similar to how people perceive macOS as part of a hardware-software amalgamation, even though a hackintosh community exists.
- Declanomous 10y ago
  Yeah, the weirdest thing is that the chipset this thing used was released almost two years ago. Regarding drivers, it's always fun to plug something that is 20 years old in to my computer and have it work. I like showing off to my friends by using something that last had a supported driver for Windows 98. However it's a bit embarrassing when something that should work doesn't. I'd love to contribute more, but I'm not capable of writing drivers from scratch, and a lot of drivers are just hacks built on top of hacks. I wish building drivers didn't involve hours of reverse engineering proprietary protocols. For instance, I managed to get a dymo desktop label printer working, but only with one font size, and I can't actuate the cutter. I'd be more than happy to finish the driver if Dymo released the specs for their protocol, but as it stands I'm just happy I can get the minimum level of functionality out of it. This entire conversation makes me realize why people think I'm a masochist for using Linux.

rubatuga 10y ago

I'm totally feel you on the mind-numbing latency that seems to exist with Linux drivers and any sort of semi-modern technology. It's funny you mention Xorg breaking. It's unbelievable how fragile Xorg is. I remember a decade ago booting Ubuntu for the first time and struggling to get X working with an old nvidia mobile chipset, and any single change in the terribly complex Xorg conf files would cause a failure to boot, forcing me into console mode. Looking back, Linux was quite unfriendly regarding drivers and support, but I feel it's made a lot of progress for more popular systems. It's an innate problem of Linux itself. Maybe we should focus on the systems that are certified or well-supported by Linux out-of-box like the dell xps series, similar to how people perceive macOS as part of a hardware-software amalgamation, even though a hackintosh community exists.

Declanomous 10y ago
Yeah, the weirdest thing is that the chipset this thing used was released almost two years ago. Regarding drivers, it's always fun to plug something that is 20 years old in to my computer and have it work. I like showing off to my friends by using something that last had a supported driver for Windows 98. However it's a bit embarrassing when something that should work doesn't. I'd love to contribute more, but I'm not capable of writing drivers from scratch, and a lot of drivers are just hacks built on top of hacks. I wish building drivers didn't involve hours of reverse engineering proprietary protocols. For instance, I managed to get a dymo desktop label printer working, but only with one font size, and I can't actuate the cutter. I'd be more than happy to finish the driver if Dymo released the specs for their protocol, but as it stands I'm just happy I can get the minimum level of functionality out of it. This entire conversation makes me realize why people think I'm a masochist for using Linux.