TP-LINK Archer T2U AC600 Wireless Dual-Band USB Adapter

I just picked up one of these, brand new, for practically nothing on FleaBay. Works like a charm on Windoze7 and quite fast.

I was slightly disappointed to see that getting the thing to work with anything Linux-y requires reading a lot of length threads (e.g on the Ubuntu forums) followed by some unspecified amount of futzing around. This would have been useful with my HTPC otherwise. Oh well.

USB device ID is 148F:761A and apparently, the thing is alleged to contain a MediaTek MT7610U chipset.

If anybody is maintaining a hardware support wish list, please add this.

Quote from chewitt

MT7610U has a Linux driver that "works" but makes crappy Realtek drivers look like polished perfection. It does not follow basic kernel standards for important things like wireless regulatory domain and is not of sufficient quality to consider adding into LE. The related but older MT7601U was ground-up rewritten and has had in-kernel support for about 18-months, but there are no signs of it being extended to the the newer mediatek chips. As is usual for far-east wireless chip vendors, they appear to have no interest in Linux.

Yea, I kinda guessed that the story (on Linux support for this chipset) would be along the lines you have stated.

I wish I had some magic bullets to fire into the heads of the execs of these far-east chip vendors that would make them care about Linux. Sigh. But I guess that as long as they can build things that they can sell to Windoze weenies...

P.S. I think that I saw on TP-LINK's web site that they do have OSX drivers for this thing. One would think that maybe those could be leveraged for Linux somehow, but maybe not.

I think that I should become a Linux driver writer. Guarranteed job security, because there are always new devices like this coming to market.