Wifi isn't quite solved on any platform. It is also quite hard to decide what solved really looks like!

My wife and I have identical HP laptops. Her's runs Arch (as you do), with KDE and mine runs Kubuntu 25.10 at the mo. Both use NetworkManager.

I look after both.

Randomly after wake up from suspend, wifi may or may not still be working. When I say random, I mean after a kernel update or the wind changes direction. I think wifies lappy is OK now because I seem to get a lot less "support" calls for the last few weeks.

To be fair, there are a lot of moving parts from a lot of bits of Linux involved in a modern distro these days.

When I say hard to decide what solved looks like: if Samba or SSSD crap out, is that wifi's fault or the kernel/driver? This is exactly what Windows has had to solve over the years and I do note things like credential managers and mounts that manage to survive disconnects being bolted on to Linux.

All that scrappy stuff needs to be passed on to the BSDs too. Getting a laptop with file systems that come and go, with a dickey clock tick and networking that comes and goes and VPNs and all the rest.

Getting all of that to work is quite a job.

But that is still for a limited number of chipsets though right? I would absolutely love to see way more support. I remember awhile back the FreeBSD Foundation putting some serious (on their scale of funds) funds to WiFi.

Yes and no. OpenZFS on Linux still isn't as seamless and most distros still don't make it easy to do ZFS on root. Its definitely gotten better though.

It's still out-of-tree though, isn't it?

After daily driving OpenBSD and FreeBSD, i can point the finger at the kernel subsystems that tries to handle everything under the sun, but with no clear direction and competing projects with different designs. Everything is three or more layers, each governed by a different team and interacting in opaque ways.

Meanwhile in the *BSD, you have the devices or some other OS concepts/subsystems, then a control layer with the associated management tools. Any other tool is either an alternate version, or a UI paint job.

Because it is. Linux doesn't really have a concrete idea of a "base system" like the BSDs do. Linux is more of a hodgepodge of components that are developed by different, and often a lot more isolated teams than we think, that all just gets integrated together. Which is truly an astonishing achievement of engineering, so I don't wanna seem like I am short selling it. Think of like the developer who work on gcc and the libc and the kernel, maybe some cross pollination, but not a lot. FreeBSD, the user land, kernel and even the libc team all happens under "1 roof."

either bash, or one of those ridiculous mainframe languages from the 1960s with impossible-to-remember names

I'm glad this fits with my intuition

I think they assume people know what they're doing but a little x session never hurt anyone?

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