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Wifi Convergence


raymac46

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Remember 10 years ago when if you wanted to do wifi in Linux you had just about one option - an Atheros chipset. And if you had Broadcom in your laptop you were in for a world of hurt.

Well, Qualcomm bought Atheros and now Broadcom is in a hostile takeover effort of Qualcomm - only offering $117 billion US. So Linux's worst nightmare will (maybe) own Linux's best hope for wifi.

Of course, the takeover has a lot more to do with smartphone chipsets than it does with Linux wifi and Broadcom has really stepped up its Linux game in the past few years. But oh the irony of it all... :oops:

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Ironic for sure.

Linux has come a long way with chip support and it's usually possible to get most working. Maybe more tricky if they are recently released.

Why does wifi need so many different chipsets? Realtek seem to have dozens of different ones that all do basically the same thing, in fact I think most chip makers do. I have a Realtek one that's several years old in TP-Link WN-822N V4 that still needs a driver built from Github. :(

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I suppose each maker needs a specific chipset for B, N, AC adapters, PCI, PCIe USB connections, various antenna and size configurations, multi bands and so on.

I agree that a lot more are supporting Linux. I suppose that was inevitable given the number of laptops we have now.

There has been a disturbing number that requires non-free firmware though. Not a good thing if you want to use Debian. Intel and even Atheros are tending this way.

Edited by raymac46
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