this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
389 points (96.6% liked)

Open Source

31262 readers
282 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] squaresinger@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

Uh, Wifi drivers in the 2000s on Linux... That was painful. I remember one specific Wifi USB stick, where the Linux driver just came as source code. I mean, good for them for making an open source driver, but back then I was just a teenager with very little coding experience, and they had no guide on how to compile it at all. Also it was written for an older version of gcc than what I had, and gcc threw a ton of errors because that. So I had to go through the whole driver source and fix all these compiler errors, even though I had no C++ experience at all. Just to get a dumb Wifi stick to work.

In Windows, back than, it was just "plonk it in, double click the driver on the CD and be done". I don't miss those days.