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It doesn't support a lot of modern Wi-Fi chipsets. There was an entire wave of Broadcom-powered stuff that they weren't able to develop for.

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That sounds more like licensing issues than "being 20 years in the past."

The result is the same for users, regardless of where the blame lies.

Right but we need a dose of realism. They don't develop the drivers, and they don't make the hardware. If the manufacturer doesn't care, then that's that.

It's a network problem. Manufacturers aren't gonna care unless it's a big OS with lots of users. Your OS won't get a lot of users unless it has drivers. So the result is stagnation, and only the Big 3 OS continuing. Well... really the Big 2. Mac OS is a unique situation.

There was some licensing drama[0] around BSD’s Broadcom bcm43xx driver. No idea if another driver was ever implemented as I’m not a BSD user.

[0] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20070405163434.GA18477@gollum.na...

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