cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/38558693
We have a Macbook Air mid 2013 and no matter what distro I tried, making wi-fi work was pain due to Broadcom drivers and not having ethernet port. Basically had to install the drivers via phone tethering.
However, probably because of the drivers, there are certain problems like disconnecting out of blue or really slow connection or cannot reconnect unless reboot the PC.
So I want to ask, if you have this Macbook and have Linux installed, which distro you're using it with? How is it?
Recently I installed Bazzite on a home computer and printers, Xbox controller, iPhone connection, everything the owners need worked out of the box. I'm wondering, would it also work fine with this Macbook too?
Edit: I added these to a blocklist, which I created here >> /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-wl.conf
This is for BCM4360 adapter.
blacklist b43
blacklist b43legacy
blacklist bcm43xx
blacklist bcma
blacklist brcm80211
blacklist brcmfmac
blacklist brcmsmac
blacklist ssb
For now, it seems fine but need more time to see if the problems are actually gone. At least the reception issue is gone I guess.
Edit 2: Installed LMDE, which wi-fi was working even on live ISO. However, same problems also present here. It has dkms
version of the driver but I don't sense any difference. Same connection drops, same random slowness.
Also found this thread. It describes my issues, but sadly no replies.
@muhyb
I have a MacBook Pro 13" late-2013 running Cinnamon (Mint based I think) and I had to install some arcane binary driver package to enable WLAN. Can’t remember now which chipset and which driver but I’ll recherche and get back to you. Please ping me if there’s no answer this week.
Mint Cinnamon still isn’t the OS of choice as it confuses sleep levels on this machine.
Thanks for the reply! Currently it seems to be fixed with blacklisting but we'll see if there will be any issues. Someone else mentioned that Mint can install required drivers on its drivers program (by connecting the Macbook via phone tethering).
Could you perhaps check which adapter your Macbook has? The one we have has BCM4360.
@muhyb
Same chip/card/module:
—
03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM4360 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 03)
—
… and it’s a Debian bookworm/Cinnamon.
Do you have connection issues by the way? I installed LMDE today and there is a fluctuation in netspeed. It's fine on boot but might change after that. It drops to 2 mbit/s.
@muhyb
Nope. Maybe a problem caused by silently dying hardware? Those tiny Bluetooth/WLAN combi cards do that sometimes …
For replacements, take a look at eBay, for example. IFixit has decend instructions (it’s simple).
Possible but I don't think that would be it since it was perfectly fine when running MacOS. I also checked an adapter replacement video and it seems quite easy, just in case if I need it (hopefully not). So thanks for the recommendation.
By the way, I checked from kernel-org and it says BCM4360 is not supported.
When I check the which module is loaded
dmesg | grep -i wlan
says it's BCM43a0.However,
lspci -nn | grep -i network
says it's BCM4360. Is this the problem? I also checked this on live ISO EndeavourOS and got the same result.