Maybe belongs in /c/extremelypopularthoughts

  • krey@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • dx1@lemmy.worldOP
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      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 (if they actually omitted that) 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.

      The headphone and USB ones are the ones I hate the most. My “flagship” phone doesn’t work with any of my ~15 pairs of headphones (mostly earbuds but a few actually nice ones) without an adapter. Booting up a laptop into a nix OS that doesn’t have wpa_supplicant etc. installed, no ethernet dongle or ethernet port, that’s about to be annoying.

      This is more about laptops/phones than desktops btw. Normal sized desktops usually still ship with every port, plus one or two USB-C’s these days.

      • Kangie@lemmy.srcfiles.zip
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        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.

        • dx1@lemmy.worldOP
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          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.

    • 🅿🅸🆇🅴🅻@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I think the point was universal dongle with universal BLE / radio protocol. It could still have different encryption schemes and keys for each device / manufacturer by upgrading / installing drivers (so in software), but at least the radio packet protocol would be the same which would keep the hardware universal. Kind of like how smart home hubs (WiFi +/ Zigbee +/ Bluetooth +/ 433MHz / etc) work.

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