Linux Just Keeps on improvising, adapting and improving

I was trying to install manjaro 18 Illyria onto an old haier laptop , i.e. haier y11b for the past 3 three days. Actually the kernel that came pre-installed with that version didn’t support the laptop’s wifi driver so i had use internet on the laptop via usb or bluetooth tethering. I didn’t have this problem with any other linux installation so i didn’t know how to install drivers that were missing. However, on day 2 i found out that driver rtl 8723ae was present on github, i found three versions
but whenever i tried to install those drivers some i/o error appeared that didn’t let me open the terminal with having to update manjaro. The update was about 1.7 GB I installed the update and after the update my laptop wouldn’t boot any more, so i watched a tutorial and realized the I had to make an boot/efi drive; so I did. Still, I couldn’t update the driver.

The next day it randomly clicked in my mind that I should install the latest manjaro 20 onto that laptop, and as soon as I got installed it detected my wifi which meant the driver issue was gone, thank you devs and those who dedicate their time to Linux. I am probably the first Pakistani to install manjaro on this hiaer model which the government of Pakistan awarded to students.

Now, i m curious as to how linux knew that this driver was needed or still relevant, and why would they add older drivers to newer kernels.

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System info:

inxi -Fazy

Illyria? That’s over a year old already. A lot has changed in Manjaro in the meantime.

There you have it. The package compression algorithm has changed ─ from xz to zstd ─ as well as that the way kernels are updated has changed, and the GRUB boot loader has changed and needed manual intervention, and that’s all just the beginning. :wink:

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