I have a very old laptop. I bought my Dell Inspiron 3421 back in 2013. It has a 3rd gen core-i3 CPU with 4 GB ram. It is too outdated for windows 10 with its 4 GB memory. So I wanted to run a Linux OS which can run smoothly on old hardware.
I chose Pop! OS for its simplicity and availability of common software because it’s based on Ubuntu. Therefore, I downloaded the OS and made a bootable USB stick. The installation part was very easy and quick. I have Pop! OS ready to use within minutes.
I loved the simplistic design and overall outlook. Then I found my Wireless adapter is not working. It does not have the necessary driver. So, I installed the driver and restarted the PC. WiFi worked great. Everything was fine.
A few days later I found again the wireless adapter is not working. This time, the driver is installed. But OS can not find my wireless adapter. So, I searched on google and tried some solutions. But no progress.
I made a bootable USB stick again and installed the OS once again. Some story. No wifi driver. Installed it. Worked great. A few days later, no wifi adapter found. I thought my wireless adapter is faulty.
Then I thought, will the wireless adapter work on windows?
I wanted to avoid windows 10. So I opted for windows 7. After the installation of Windows 7 and the necessary drivers for my laptop, it is running without any problem so far. And I am writing this post on windows 7.
I did some googling for this weird problem. Many people have faced the “wireless adapter not found” problem on their Linux machine especially the Ubuntu-based machine. Guess it’s their problem. I will try to find out this problem with Fedora. Hopefully, I can find a solution with the fedora. Until then my experiment with Pop! OS is over.