Looking for ideas for a new wifi adapter
 

After a misadventure **, I need a new wifi adapter

must be:
(sadly) not a realtek
usb
dual-band 2.4ghz and 5ghz
802.11ac on 5ghz
have connection(s) for external antenna(s)
hardware must be bullet-proof against badly written drivers.

And of course, Linux compatible, preferably without my needing to compile the driver.


**
I have been using a rtl8812au (dual band 802.11ac) usb adapter for a short while now.

After I updated to the most recent linux driver (20210820), it was downgraded to a generic realtek 802.11n wifi. - and xfinitywifi only does 5ghz "ac" or "a", not "n". Leaving me with only 6megabit "a".

I rolled back the linux driver to "20210629", but the downgrade in my wifi appears persistent, now it still is detected as a generic realtek 802.11n

I would guess that perhaps the newest driver wrote something to the wifi adapter's eeprom (??)

Would that be the "official" (crap) driver from the vendor ?.

Have a read of this before parting with any more of your hard-earned on new hardware. I haven't used Slack in years, but some-one has probably packaged it up for you.

Have you thought of checking vendors who sell native Linux computers. I know that ThinkPenguin sells wireless adapters guaranteed work with Linux.

Full disclosure: I have no relationship with ThinkPenguin other than as an occasional customer.

No, I started out using the morrownr driver
here

the updated driver which downgraded my wifi was
here


I will try the aircrack-ng driver. At this point there is nothing left to lose.

I haven't looked at that morrownr page in a good while, but I see an attempt to keep current a list of in-kernel supported chips here. Gotta be a good place to start.

The aircrack-ng driver compiled and installed on slackware 15.0
And it works with xfinity (so far), which is better than the morrownr (20210820) driver was doing. Hopefully all will be good.

I figured out why the morrownr's downgrade of of my wifi appeared persistent. It had not written to the eeprom. It was simply not allowing itself to be rolled back, I needed to manually rm 8812au.ko to proceed.


Thank you for pointing me to the aircrack-ng 8812au driver. It works better for general use wifi than the morrownr driver(s) ever did for me. Though other people's experiences may or may not vary in that regard.

I would guess this is a better solution than the question I asked of which new wifi to get. So I will call it solved.