Kubuntu is Doing What the Others Didnt

[Alan the Adequate]

I've ended up selecting Kubuntu as my OS of choice as I start to wean myself off Windows10 between now and Judgment Day.

I auditioned numerous distros and found a lot of similarity, but the big selling point which tipped me towards the K Crowd was that it immediately detected and talked to my $15 generic USB wi-fi antenna adapter sticking out of the back of my cheap-ass Dell dual-core. None of the others even noticed it -- including heavy hitters like OpenSuse. They all saw my LAN card and didn't even give me the offer to hunt for the adapter.

I do eventually have to replace this machine as the graphics are still stuck in the stone age; and being a dual-core, it is essentially 12-13 years old (Also, Dell never activated the DisplayPort socket). But the fact this distro made it that easy to get on the Internet and pull down all the updates right from Jump Street, it'll follow along to the new box.

Why didn't the authors of those other distros think wireless access was that important from the get-go?

[claydoh]

Awesome! Linux and USB Wi-Fi are notoriously bad, or at least inconsistent.

USB wi-fi antenna adapter

Realtek

Why didn't the authors of those other distros think wireless access was that important from the get-go?

It IS important, but the crap or old drivers Realtek release for Linux are not great, and are not necessarily 'free', and they do not seem to provide technical information or specs, which makes development of good drivers hard.

IMNSHO you got a bit lucky-ish. The kernel version has a lot to do with this, as well as the direction the wind is blowing when you installed the OS it seems.

Compare your Kubuntu (Ubuntu, actually) OS specs to the version of OpenSuse you tried. Which ones of each did you test?
The desktop GUI has no effect on hardware support, either., luckily

For example If you tried Openseuse Leap, it has kernel 6.4, while *buntu 24.04 comes with 6.8, but last week updated to 6.14 (same as Ubuntu 25.04), which does provide much better native, in-kernel support for Realtek wifi chips.


Distros that keep things much more current, such as Fedora, Opensuse tumbleweed, and Arch, these would already have had this as they by nature update *everything* more rapidly, but on the flip side, (theoretically and not likely) , this might have something that breaks the driver. or something else.

USB WiFi is one of the last places where Linux drivers are still quite spotty and poor -- mainly because most ALL of them use Realtek ships. If Intel made USB wifi cards, or even Mediatek, things would be better.


There are good well supported USB dongles, but they won't usually be the cheap ones.
I have one from this company, which provide their own Linux driver repo, though my dongle hasn't needed that at all after the 6.8 kernel, and had in-kernel drivers in 6.4 (but for me had frequent disconnects)


From my long experience with these USB wifi dongles....almost all are Realtek -- aka crap, in terms of firmwares and their linux drivers, if they even provide any that aren't truly ancient.


There are quite a few different git repos that hack on the out-of-kernel realtek wifi drivers just for this sort of reason, and not just for USB devices.

And do note the slight chance that a kernel security patch can have the potential to break this, just something to keep in the back of your mind.

[Snowhog]

"If you want to drive a Porche, don't expect Porche performance if you put a '59 Beetle engine it it."