I installed Ubuntu on a partition of my MacBook, but I’m experiencing very weak Wi-Fi signal. I’ve seen some comments saying this might be a bug related to Broadcom drivers.
I found this post: Installing Broadcom Wireless Drivers
I followed all the steps from the second comment, but the issue still isn’t fixed. My network card is [14e4:43ba] (rev 02).
Does anyone know how to solve this?
I'm using ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS
Thanks!
On Linux, ideally, you have all drivers provided OOTB (so nothing to install). Unfortunately, it isn't the case with Broadcom. Generally saying, Broadcom company seems to lack good programmers: their wifi driver not only isn't the kernel, but is known to be buggy in general, and was also relying heavily on some binary blobs that other programmers can't fix.
So, looking at the answer you're referring to, I was surprised to see there's a bcmwl-kernel-source now that sounds like it at least have some source codes.
So I did some reasearch: the bcmwl-kernel-source package the answer is referring to is same as broadcom-wl¹, and on this page it can be seen that the source of the sources (no pun intended) is on the Broadcom's page.
What that means is that this code still comes from Broadcom site as a code drop with no history or anything. Your best bet as a user is to report a bug to Broadcom. If you have development experience and motivation (or just motivation, because it's typically way more important than experience), you could try digging into the sources. Though I bet they rely a lot on the firmware, where the problem may reside, in which case fixing this might be complicated.
1: Found the package also on this page, and it refers to someone's Github reupload, which in turn claims at the bottom to be same package as this one.
