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Comment by barongrounds | Hacker News Reader

Make sure you replace the worthless Broadcom wifi chip with an Intel. It's puzzling that Dell would cheap out on an otherwise excellent machine.

At least swapping them out is an easy job.

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The Linux version has the Intel wifi by default. Only Windows version has the Broadcom.

Is that still true? I thought they'd changed that. I would have the developer edition myself, but I live in Australia and it's not available here.

The Broadcom chip is equally as bad in either windows or Linux in my experience.

The latest one (4th gen, late 2016, Kaby Lake) uses Killer Wireless (ath10k) for both Windows and Linux versions.

Under Linux it works, but from what I hear, it's very slow.

Fwiw, the broadcom chip is supported and works fine with Linux on my XPS 15. No extra work required.

It works, but "works fine" is a long stretch. Takes a long time to connect, particularly after suspend, sometimes several minutes or longer. This is true of both windows and Linux.

I've got the broadcom wireless in my 9343. Never experienced this issue. Guess I'm lucky.

You could also consider the Precision 5510 [1] if a Quadro GPU works for you. Essentially an XPS 15 but it includes Intel wifi. Recently got one from work and I've been pretty happy with it.

[1] http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-m5510-workstatio...

At least the Broadcom chipsets can do soft-AP mode on Linux, something that IIRC even the top-notch Intel chipsets can't.

Are you sure about that? In the past, I've used Centrino N6205 in AP mode to share internet connection of the Thinkpads T430s 3G modem.

iw info also says, that it supports AP mode.

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