rtl8188ce-linux-driver

Agreed, you definitely missed my point, but in your defense the point was implied rather than explicitly stated so I'll take the fault for not being clear. I don't mind building my own drivers (in fact I maintain one[1]), but I would never expect the average person to have to do that. It would be entirely unreasonable. But, the vast majority of linux users don't have to compile any drivers. Unless you have some obscure piece of hardware or one that is so new that the driver isn't mainlined yet, you don't have to worry about it. You say you've been using linux for 20 years. which driver(s) in the last 5 or so years have you had to compile yourself? [1]: https://github.com/FreedomBen/rtl8188ce-linux-driver

I maintain a custom/forked driver[1] and support both Fedora/RHEL/CentOS and Ubuntu, and while Ubuntu has gotten much better, in years past I actually had to manage Ubuntu specific branches because they were so hacked up with custom patches from Canonical. I would spend more time fixing Ubuntu weirdness than I would all other distros combined. It's gotten much better the past several releases though, so thank you to Canonical for that :-) The various RPM flavors keep their kernels vanilla enough that I can mostly just rebase on top of linux-stable, and it's been that way since I started 7 years ago (according to github). Arch is the winner. I've never had to make a custom patch for Arch. Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat but opinions are my own [1]: https://github.com/FreedomBen/rtl8188ce-linux-driver

Yes, the wifi antennas are very specifically sized for the 802.11 frequency ranges. They also often have band pass filters built in to prevent transmissions outside of those bands, as required by FCC regulations and such. That said, if you are really interested in that kind of thing, and you are willing to switch to Linux, the wireless card drivers are very hackable. Source: I forked the driver for my wireless card many years ago and still maintain it, tho these days it's mostly the upstream kernel driver plus a few hacks to get the most out of the hardware: https://github.com/FreedomBen/rtl8188ce-linux-driver

Ah, interesting. I barely move my Thinkpad, too, so it's not that big of a deal, but it's very sad all the situation. Someone mentioned here a github user was maintaining a driver for the card he was using, so I decided to check out if someone had a patched version of the Realtek I have on my computer, and it seems that there is: https://github.com/FreedomBen/rtl8188ce-linux-driver You might want to check out https://github.com/pvaret/rtl8192cu-fixes and https://github.com/dz0ny/rt8192cu