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If the internal wifi doesn't work you could try a supported USB-based wifi adapter. Your internal card might eventually be supported. If having internal wifi is very important then try before you buy.

Do you remember what Linux wifi support was like between 2000 and 2010? Wifi drivers are pretty hard to write and there are virtually no docs for any of the available hardware. Linux (and FreeBSD, too) have better wifi support nowadays because vendors have finally started writing drivers for those systems. Look at the email addresses of authors in copyright statements of Linux drivers for Atheros, Broadcom, and Intel cards, for example, and you'll see that this driver code was written in-house by vendors. OpenBSD doesn't get that level of support from vendors.



By the way, add Realtek and Ralink (now Mediatek) to the above list of companies writing drivers for Linux.

And now name a wifi chipset that isn't made by one of these companies. :-)

It's awesome that Linux has achieved this kind of support. But this is a luxury. Don't take it for granted. It took a long time and a lot of energy to get there. These companies are still keeping hardware docs under NDAs so it is very hard for other open source systems to compete fairly.




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