I’ve been a big fan of Ubuntu for quite some time and have started using it on my main PC. Mainly though I use my HP laptop because I can use it on the train and at Uni.
I decided I wanted to run Ubuntu on the laptop as I’m working with Kubernetes for my Honours year project and Hyper-V is an annoying barrier I’d rather not deal with. However, my Wifi is always breaking after updates. I’ve got an askubuntu post up (https://askubuntu.com/questions/1074863/realtek-rtl8623be-back-to-low-signal-wifi-after-update) that goes into this in more detail (saves this post getting too long). It seems to me every time I do a kernel update, it breaks.
Would another distro be a solution for this? For the time being, I’ve gone back to windows because ‘it justs works’ without any messing about. I don’t mind the messing about, just not after every update.
With these sort of situations, I usually just go buy an Intel wifi and side-grade to it. As they’re supported in the kernel and only cost like $20. Just install and forget it.
If you can’t find a software solution, then I recommend this approach.
I know for a fact that this works on linux kernel >=4.14.
currently running inside my Razer Blade Stealth late 2017
I thought about doing this. But because the issue is apparently due to HP only using 1 antenna instead of 2 (why I have to mess about with ant_sel) I didn’t think that would fix it?
From my experience, broadcom and realtek have always been annoying to work with. If it doesn’t work out of the box for me then I replace it with what will work.
Would any intel one work as long as it’s the correct fitting? I know the manual has a couple of supported ones but I found this one HERE that i could get for tomorrow?
You would want to check the spec sheet first which intel provides. The one I linked is IIRC the most recent one, but they only are plug-n-play with specific kernel versions. Like if you wanted to use CentOS with this nic then you would need to download the driver blobs and modprobe them manually, for example, unless you used a more distro.
