D-Link USB WiFi Adapter Dual Band AC1300 Wireless Internet for Desktop PC Laptop Gaming MU-MIMO Windows Mac Linux Supported (DWA-181-US)

Tiny, real plug and play and no need to install drivers that put my system at risk. i was deciding between tp-L or Netgr, or some no-brand one, the tp-L was low cost, but being infamous after the backdoor incident and being from CN, i decided to pay a little more and make sure to get a safe one. The second choice was good, but pretty pricey, i mean three times the no-brand's price was no joke. finally i checked suggestions online from when tp had that backdoor problem, and found this D-link, which is mid priced, about twice as much as the tp and the no-brand. so far so good.

This USB WiFi adapter works great and is very compact. It doesn't stick out from the laptop like older versions did. The data speed is fine for my applications.

Kids laptop was having fatal errors on the schools network, this seemed to solve the issue.Easy fix

You never know when a spare wifi adapter will come in handy. I had just built a new PC, used my Windows 10 install USB. Decided to upgrade it to Windows 11, and inexplicably my wifi adapter disappeared in my new desktop (more on that later).I had an old wifi adapter laying around, so I dug it out, and tried to get it going - problem was that it was so old that it wouldn't work on Windows 10/11, it had been designed for Windows XP and it just straight up said it was incompatible. Now I don't know if I could have come up with a workaround or not, but I decided to one-day this from Amazon for the 22 dollar asking price.The thing is nice and tiny, like about the size of 4 pennies stacked up. The speeds of the wifi adapter are adequate. I have a 300Mbps cable connection, that they kind of let me get around 350-375Mbps with, and my new desktop wifi adapter when working properly was giving me 350-375Mbps. (It came with it's own wifi antenna, so the speeds are quite good, as fast as I could get with a wired connection.)When I use this USB wifi adapter in the basement, I can get around 140-150Mbps. When I take it upstairs next to my laptop which gets around 320Mbps, the signal on this wifi adapter drops down to 72Mbps - nearly half the speed as the basement. There could be a number of factors that cause this, the signal bouncing better around the concrete basement, or just the wood of upstairs absorbs more of the energy, only an engineer could really explain exactly why.But the bottom line of that story is, the antenna / receiver or whatever can only get you so far in such a tiny form factor. The speeds will be fine for office work or some browsing, or even some gaming, but if you are looking for high performance then you should look at other options. If you are looking for affordable/small/convenient then I can definitely recommend this.I actually purchased two more of them, I definitely think you should have at least one as a backup for your primary PC in case the wifi adapter malfunctions or dies, which is something that can definitely happen.Oh, and by the way about my desktop wifi- there is a known issue with Windows 11 and the network adapters sometimes disappearing, I was finally able to restore mine, but not without a lot of researching and headaches.

This adapter does work out of the box with linux-6.8. If you notice performance issues, note that this adapter is limited to USB-2. This is still plenty for most applications. Here's the lsb_release info for the machine where this adapter is installed:Linux lenovo-20n20032us 6.8.0-54-generic #56-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Sat Feb 8 00:37:57 UTC 2025 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

The product description states this device is Linux compatible, but it doesn't operate correctly in my Ubuntu machine. The device is seen as a D-Link USB device by Linux, but not as a Network Interface Adapter.EDIT: to use this ada[ter in some machines, you have to compile the driver. That's what I did and it works now. Since Amazon won't let me tell how to do this, just go to D-Link to search for the Linux driver source code and then search for how to compile it.

I purchases this adapter primarily to add WPA3 (latest security standard) support to an older laptop. I was able to get it working with WPA3 but not out of the box. The driver that Windows 10 automatically installs doesn't support WPA3 even after trying to updating it through Windows update. In order to connect via WPA3 I had to download and install a different driver manually from the manufacturer's website.Once it gets going it seems to work okay for the most part but it does randomly drop the connection for a moment on occasion even once it's up and running. I often remote desktop into other machines with this laptop and this causes the RDP connection to drop and have to reestablish which usually happens automatically but is still an interruption. The older integrated WiFi adapter on the same laptop never did this.Whenever I first boot the system or bring it out of sleep though this adapter is very slow to come up. According to the windows task bar it's connected to WiFi but connections are very slow if at all. If I open the browser during this time I'm greeted by just a bunch of spinning tabs for about a minute before finally the speed ramps up.

Key: Use the most current version of your Linux distro and it should work out of the box. Otherwise, you are in for more work (e.g. compiling) Kernel version is key.