I learned about brcm80211 and its family of drivers (brcmfmac and brcmsmac) a few days ago, because I thought it was either b43 or wl for the broadcoms. I guess I am the lucky one whose cards are supported by neither of the brcm80211 family. And if I recall correctly, I had asked in the past for le to include b43 instead of wl.
My problem is how this (wireless card on an 15 year old laptop I use with an old x64 version of le, so older kernel)
04:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY [14e4:4315] (rev 01)
Subsystem: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY [14e4:04b5]
Kernel driver in use: wl
Kernel modules: wl
runs better than this (wireless card on a 9-10 year old laptop I set up a week ago with debian unstable and 6.9.8 today)
02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM43228 802.11a/b/g/n [14e4:4359]
Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0014]
Kernel driver in use: bcma-pci-bridge
Kernel modules: bcma
On this laptop, which I will use until the end of summer probably, I have to select between a poor performing b43 or a wl that gives a kernel panic on boot. Last update for the wl driver, for fixing compatibilities or builds with the kernels was on March 4th 2024, so it is pretty fresh.
As for the rpi... don't get me started. A few years ago, when I first got my hands on a 4gb rpi4, I had commented on the lack of a purely arm64 os from the rpi foundation and how dhcpcd is insufficient. Oh what a blasphemy that was for the fanboys! Fast forward to today and to rpi5, there is finally an arm64 image, although not fully 64bit (it has 32bit userspace as someone said) and dhcpcd was ditched in favor of network manager.