Broadcom support in distros

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crosscourt
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Broadcom support in distros

Post by crosscourt »

Im basing this on my experience with a Dell Latitude 6420 with a Broadcom wifi card. All the Ubuntu based distros except for Zorin 16 did not support Broadcom by default. Mint 20.2 brings up a system troubleshooter and asks if you want to install the drivers. Mageia 8 and PCLinuxOS dont support it by default but when you launch net applet it offers to install the drivers. On the Debian side things were much better as Q4OS,MX Linux and Netrunner all supported Broadcom by default. Its a far more mixed experience than I expected and for new users, though not serious, comes across as less than satisfying. Intel wifi cards no problem as I havent run into a distro that doesnt support them by default so far.
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tlmiller
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Re: Broadcom support in distros

Post by tlmiller »

It'll never improve really, either. Broadcom is one of the WORST companies (along with Nvidia) for FOSS support. Everything for their old cards is reverse engineered, and for their newer cards uses the proprietary WL driver that AT LEAST Broadcom did release for linux. As long as someone has alternative network when installing, every major distro offers the broadcom-wl dkms package to install, so more recent Broadcom cards are reasonably well supported, but that's an if, since A LOT of modern machines also don't include NIC's to get online without wireless. And only a few distro's include the broadcom-wl dkms package (and it's dependencies) on the installer.
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crosscourt
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Re: Broadcom support in distros

Post by crosscourt »

Its interesting as two distros using the same kernel, one supports by default the other doesnt. Overall Debian based distros do a great job of supporting wifi cards.
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