this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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[–] 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.