Asahi Linux folks are doing us a solid with WPA3 fixes

Asahi Linux folks are doing us a solid with WPA3 fixes

Thanks to a bit of anonymous feedback this morning, I have some good news about the Raspberry Pi WPA3 thing. Apparently the good folks over at the Asahi Linux project have taken up the cause of fixing the upstream kernel situation. It seems this will happen by throwing out some existing implementation that didn't work anyway, and perhaps my posts were confirmation that they were in fact crap.

This is great! Hopefully this will lower the barriers for regular people who just want things to work and don't want to patch kernels and drivers and maintain their own forks of things.

So, yay for that person cleaning up the mess of some dumb big companies. Thanks for pushing on this and not letting the suck stop you.

For the record, I've tried this on a 3B, 3B+, 4B, and now a 5B. Did I buy the 5 expecting the wifi to suck? I sure did. Did I expect to write a post bagging on it? You know it. I did my research to see if anyone else had mentioned it, and when that came up empty, I hit the store and picked one up, then came home, tested it, and wrote the post.

While waiting for this fix to come down the pipe to be usable on your systems, there are any number of alternatives. Unfortunately, they all amount to a barnacle that consumes one of your USB ports, but they do work. They tend to actually behave better with tools like Kismet, they do WPA3, and they don't make the kernel panic when you look at them funny!

If this is you, hit the USB-Wifi main menu and start digging around. Note in particular the "plug and play" list. I grabbed some weird $40 Alfa thing I had never heard of before based on a recommendation from the list. It worked great for sniffing things and generally screwing around. It also ran WPA3 as a client just fine.

This is the Linux experience I remember from the 90s: poring over compatibility lists and making sure you buy the right thing every time. That's why it's so vexing that the Pi people would keep shipping this thing in this state. You don't want your customers to keep buying these wifi barnacles, do you?