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It's not fair to blame these OSs for asking you get firmware. It is a LEGAL issue, not a technical one!!!

Get the vendors to make wifi firmware freely redistributable (or even better, fully open source + build instructions) and it will work out of the box.




In my experience you don't get anywhere asking a vendor to do that. There isn't enough Linux desktop market share to justify a change to their business model.

hell, vendors can't even be bothered to use consistent chipsets from one shipment of product to the next. The Linux community are left with checking serial numbers or product skus and maintaining wiki sites with cross-referenced tables that tell us if a given product is known to work or not. That's the world of Linux webcams and wifi.

Sadly, if there were more Linux desktops the vendors would take more care. Until the vendors take more care there won't be mainstream Linux desktop adoption.




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