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> WiFi finally seems to be working reliably

I got the XPS15 and installed Ubuntu 18.04 (best choice of laptop I could find that had an i9 8950hk, although only Windows is officially supported).

I had heard it was best to replace the Killer WiFi with an Intel mini card. However the Killer WiFi has been rock solid for me with Ubuntu (I have read that Windows has more problems with Killer WiFi than Linux!).

Regular Linux BIOS updates from Dell from within Ubuntu 18.04 - I'm a happy customer.

Edit: comment from elsewhere in this thread: "only three years ago I had to replace the default wireless card in my Dell XPS 13 because the broadcom one was flaky as hell in Linux"



Yes, I think they fixed the Killer problems on Ubuntu first and pushed their changes upstream. That may be why it works on Debian (It's only been a week.) I can dual boot Ubuntu but for reasons not immediately obvious to me DNS queries were frequently timing out, making web browsing pretty slow.

I think that Debian is getting the firmware updates too, though for the last one it didn't apply so I just booted Ubuntu and it worked w/out issue. (It uses EFI which is another benefit of that.)


Yep, replaced both the NVMe and the Broadcom wifi in my 9350. I'm not buying this year's model as the Killer wifi is soldered down. Killer indeed.


For what its worth, I've had zero issues with WiFi on my 9380. The "killer" wifi is just an ath10k:

  02:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 32)
  Subsystem: Bigfoot Networks, Inc. Killer 1435 Wireless-AC
  Kernel driver in use: ath10k_pci
As far as I can tell, its no different from any other Qualcomm Atheros WiFi. I believe the "killer" differences are just in the Windows drivers.


That's interesting - the only other issue is that I then can't upgrade to Wifi 6 or whatever, but that's probably not an issue until a few years down the track when all my other devices support the same standard.




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