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Yea kinda a bummer that I had to buy a USB dongle for a brand new XPS-13 I wanted to install FreeBSD on. I knew I had to, and considering the rest of the hardware was supported I considered it a fair trade off, because I really wanted a FreeBSD dev laptop.

I would like to help with the lack of wifi drivers situation, I'm solid programing in C, but writing network drivers seems intimidating.

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Then check out the relevant mailing lists and/or join the IRC channels; there are developers out there focusing solely on WiFi drivers for FreeBSD and they’ll welcome your effort with open arms if you’re willing to learn the ropes. :)

I got roped into writing network drivers for a research project back in undergrad.

The actual work to be done was fairly straightforward; the difficulty was collecting all the different undocumented hardware APIs and figuring out how to use them. :P

Then it might be even harder to do it right in Linux than FreeBSD. It is because Linux's ABIs change so frequently that you have to stick to some distributions to follow even if you want broader support :-)

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