I just installed Budgie on an early 2011 MacBook pro. As often the case, the Broadcom driver doesn’t work well. If I select the one provided under Additional Drivers, the wifi appears to work, but after a few minutes the connection breaks even though it’s showing it as connected. If I attempt to turn it off, it crashes the system. Evidently it’s not working.
I’ve been searching the web for alternatives but I’m a total noob and it only got me more confused. I seem to understand it’s better to install it manually than through additional drivers, but how exactly? Any tips?
You should note - the driver for this is proprietary - this means is very little ubuntu can do here if the issue is found to be very specific to broadcom rather than another part of the network component stack.
I personally keep a USB-wireless stub dongle so that where there is issues like this I have a backup that works
A little update, it seems that after updating the system the wireless driver is a little bit more stable. It disconnects every now and then but no crashes and it’s usable. However, I’m going to keep testing it for a while and should it keep being too erratic, I’m just gonna buy a dongle as you suggested. Thanks again for the tip!
Update: after a while the problem started occurring again, for some reason more often now. The wi-fi works alright until out of the blue it disconnects, the networks disappear from the list, and if I try to turn it off the system freezes with no other solution other than to restart. The driver installed at the moment is the proprietary one listed in additional drivers. Any tips at this point, other than purchasing an external dongle as suggested before? Thanks!