Originally posted by direc85
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Regarding Realtek, I went through the same thing with the RTL8211AE back in the day, and have read (and helped out people) with Realtek WiFi and Bluetooth in the past few years, so I can confidently say that Realtek WiFi is less problematic on Linux (even with all the headaches), due to volunteers fixing Realtek's issues (their code quality and coding practices are pretty bad), so over time it gets better (but always underperforming).
Qualcomm/Atheros is certainly stable, though they usually are behind in specs when it comes to products that are not things like their router and mobile SoCs (and I still don't get why they do not have any products that support 160MHz channels).
Mediatek/Ralink, I believe should be alright (since Mediatek WiFi is based upon Ralink WiFi, and based upon my experience with the Xiaomi Mi 3 and Mi 3G (V1) routers) over time (Mediatek is a known violator of the GPL, however they at least do not pull the same tricks that Broadcom/Avago and NVidia do, so the community can work with Mediatek netowrking), though not as performant as things from Intel, Qualcomm and Broadcom.
There are no Intel USB WiFi adapters, since the WLAN part of their solutions do not support any protocol other than PCIe. If you want USB, the best you can find are Broadcom and Qualcomm (both appear to be utterly rare, with it being easier to use an SDIO to USB adapter with their SDIO cards.
That reminds me, I need to raise some money outside of my usual budget to order some QCA9377 SDIO chips (in several different sizes) to solder to some boards (Smart TV, Tablets, all with either Android or Windows) instead of the Realtek garbage there.
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