I went out today to buy a wifi adaptor in Vietnam.
I bought a TP-Link Archer T3U Plus - it did not contain the expected chipset, instead it had a rtw88_8822bu . Luckily the Cell Phones store I bought it from let me return it. They also let me test four other adaptors, none of which contained a Linux compatible wifi chipset.
The Tp-Link TL-WN725N was the best (and oldest) option, with a RTL8188EUS but still not compatible out of the box.
The TP-Link Archer T2UB contained an AICSEMI as did the TP-Link Archer TX1U
The very helpful staff in the store had no idea what I was doing with my Fedora Laptop!
The moral of the story? If you’re in VN and need a compatible wifi adaptor, take your laptop in and test the devices with
lsusb
and compare to the chart at USB-WiFi/home/USB_WiFi_Chipsets.md at main · morrownr/USB-WiFi · GitHub
I didn’t end up getting anything, so if you know a product in VN please do reply here.
This is something I remember from back in the day and trying to find wireless cards with particular Atheros chipsets since Atheros was more Linux friendly (MadWifi driver project which turned into ath5k and later Atheros released their own open source drivers).
I’d found an Asus card that used a supported chipset so when I later went to build another PC for someone else, I again bought the same card. Only to discover during installation that wifi wasn’t detected.
Turns out that during what was just a few months, Asus had revised the card and v2 now used a Realtek chip. So I had to go on eBay, look for the card I was after and then ask the sellers if the card was a v1 or v2.
Not even two different cards, but the same card, branded the same (part numbers and all), just different revisions. That was a pain in the ass.
I think I’ll take my laptop to a second hand computer store and see if they’ll let me go through their stock looking for what I need.
Tonight I’ll have to manually install RTL8192EU, to use a device I already have. Oh well…