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Comment on Having separate dongles for network, audio, video etc. is even worse than just having specific cables for each

krey@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

Image If you don’t have a dongle, the dongle is basically just hidden inside (a chip on the main board or an extension card). Being able to add dongles is a very easy way to quickly add things like wifi. Otherwise you’d have to open the PC and mount a card and the number of slots inside is also limited. So yeah, builtin is good, but also no, dongles can be better. It’s just a different option.

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dx1@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I guess you could use the same argument to say you’re buying less when you buy your laptop. It’s just arbitrary data I/O through USB with the software level interpreting it. They don’t have to ship a DAC or wifi radio or… whatever you call the component that’s part of a GPU that converts to HDMI, instead they offload that to the dongle or peripheral. In effect your device is just slowly being whittled down to a processor to USB bridge.

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- Kangie@lemmy.srcfiles.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  Booting up a laptop … that doesn’t have wpa_supplicant etc
  
  If you french fry when you pizza you’re gonna have a bad time.
  
  Seriously though, if you want to use wifi without some sort of supplicant you’ve fucked up.
  
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  - dx1@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    You can put it on, but at that point you’re with reinstalling the system or moving packages over on a thumb drive. Huge pain.
    
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314xel@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The point was universal dongle with universal BLE / radio protocol. It could still have different encryption keys for each device / manufacturer by upgrading / installing drivers, but at least the radio packet protocol would be the same which would keep the hardware universal. Kind of like how smart home hubs (Zigbee / Bluetooth / 433Hz / etc) work.

But we all know how creating a new “universal” protocol goes from experience (ie USB “standards”).

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