I have an oldish Dell Latitude 7480 which doesn’t meet the requirements for upgrade to Windows 11 so I thought I’d take the opportunity to install Linux on it as I only really need it for day to day web stuff / studying / media and light gaming.
My first choice was Linux Mint but, for some reason it would not recognise that the laptop had a wifi card. So I tried Manjaro but felt Arch wasn’t for me so opted for Pop_OS and whilst everything I want works I thought I’d use the time to distro hop live environments to see what else was out there.
I know live envs doesn’t give you the full picture but to be honest I was more interested in the aesthetic appeal of the DE.
Where my curiosity lies is this, from my understanding Linux Mint is based on underlying Ubuntu as is Pop_OS, so how come both Pop_OS and Ubuntu recognise the wi-fi card out of the box so to speak but Mint doesn’t.
This is the wifi card in question:
description: Wireless interface
product: Wireless 8265 / 8275
vendor: Intel Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0
logical name: wlp2s0
version: 78
serial: cc:2f:71:ec:52:b1
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=iwlwifi driverversion=6.6.6-76060606-generic firmware=36.ca7b901d.0 8265-36.ucode ip=192.168.1.6 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11
resources: irq:131 memory:ec000000-ec001fff
And with this in mind, does anyone have any idea how to get this wi-fi card working with Mint, I’m assuming I need a drive which the other drivers have but Mint, for whatever reason, doesn’t have.
Update:
I thought it would be easier to edit the post than reply to you all individually and thanks to everyone who took the time to respond so quickly.
I’ve just re-tried with the latest version 21.3 and it all works, maybe by newbie brain did something wrong with the first install.
I’ll probably stick with Pop_OS as it does what I need and I quite like the Gnome interface.
But again, thank you all for your input it’s awesome to know that swift help is available for idiots newbies like me.
Intel and the iwlwifi driver are very well supported and should work out of the box. You might try the Edge ISO, I don’t know what kernel is in the regular 21.3 ISO but Edge is supposed to be newer in general. Upgrading to 21.3 is simple once installed.
https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/edge.html
There is also an odd solution at https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=399427 (applies to a normal PC, but if you’re able to remove your laptop battery or turn off the battery in the bios for a tik).
Just to add because I don’t think it’s super well known, Linux Mint makes it very easy to switch between kernel versions in their graphical updater. In the View menu there is a Linux Kernels option where you can switch. Currently you can use the default 5.15 LTS kernel but there are options for 5.19, 6.2, and 6.5. They follow Ubuntu upstream for support, so only 5.15, 6.2, and 6.5 are actively supported (with 6.2 near end of life).
The Debian edition does not have a pretty way to switch to the backports kernel (currently 6.5) unfortunately.