How I Switched from Windows 10 to Linux Mint

[hunter]

9. Getting certain wifi hardware to work can be troublesome.

It's very similar to the way software modems were many years ago. You could get some "WinModems" to work in Linux, but not others. I gave up and always used full feature external modems attached to the serial port.

Buying a USB wifi dongle that claims to be "Linux compatible" and recognized out of the box by Linux Mint and other Ubuntu based Linux distributions seems to be a crap shoot as well. I once bought one on Amazon and it wasn't plug-and-play, of course. It did come with some incomprehensible translated-by-google Chinese instructions on how to use ndiswrapper which is now obsolete.

To get most wifi dongles to work in Linux you have to find out what chip set they use and download the appropriate drivers, likely from a "non-free" or dirty repository. Some of these drivers are dirty because they violate copyright and other intellectual property laws, which is amusing if the wifi dongle itself is a rip-off of someone else's intellectual property.

I have a Panda wireless dongle that works without much fuss, as I recall, but only if I installed the ralink drivers during the original Debian install when it was requested. Linux mint or Ubuntu are said to recognize these without any trouble.

Penguin usb wireless dongle are specifically branded for Linux but they are expensive, starting at $35. I have a random $5 usb dongle that uses the same chipset ( or knock-off ) as the Penguin which also works well.

I eventually got the built in wifi working on my widows laptop working when it was booted into Linux but I didn't take notes on how I did it. I do remember it was an irritating process.