OK - I'm going to sound like a phan-boi ... but

[srq2625]

Maybe it's not unique to LM, but I find the ease with which the installer works to be amazing.

Case in point, for my desktop, I have a couple of wireless NICs. The one of interest here is

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scott@broadcom-lm:~$ lspci | grep Network
09:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Limited BCM4352 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 03)

Debian can't handle this card (at least not stretch). I know, I tried. They have a device driver that almost works, but it's sluggish when not used for a bit, looses connection, sometimes doesn't connect. You get the drift.

So, I thought the desktop was limited to wired connection - in fact I did some "let's run some wires under the house" to connect the desktop to the router that is on the other side of the house. BTW - the wired connection beats the WiFi every time. Just saying.

Anyway decided to run an experiment on an empty scratch disk (I have a few)

• Disconnect the Cat5 from the box
• Install the above card
• Boot up the LiveUSB of LM 19 MATE that I downloaded today
• Of course the WiFi card was not recognized and I had no internet connection, but I went ahead with the installation anyway.
• Reboot the box and the WiFi still didn't work so I started up the device manager. It complained about no internet but offered to look at the installation media instead.
• So, I inserted the LiveUSB and the device manager was happy.
• Device manager found the source code for the kernel module required for the WiFi chip, compiled it, installed it and then told me to reboot.
• Rebooted the computer and WOW, the WiFi was working.
• Establish a connection with my WiFi router and life is golden

Like I said above, I don't know if this is unique to LM, but the fact that I was able to install a system, and then install the CORRECT WiFi driver all without an internet connection - doesn't get much better than that!

[gm10]

Such success stories are always nice to hear. The driver manager is specific to Mint but it uses the ubuntu-drivers code from, as the name implies, Ubuntu.