Rich Felker
FYI in case this is relevant to anyone considering buying one:
The Nintendo Switch has the most utterly garbage WiFi (and possibly also TCP) implementation I've ever seen in a mainstream platform that relies on high performance networking for many of its popular apps to even be usable.
Rich Felker
It randomly refuses to connect to networks that appear full strength to any reasonable client device, and makes you go through 2-3 modals saying "no I really don't need to change the settings or re-enter the password" every time it fails. When it does manage to connect, performance is abysmal unless you're less than a meter or two away from the AP.
Rich Felker
Performance is often in the hundreds of kB or worse per second when other devices nearby are happily doing 5+ MB/s on the same network.
Rich Felker
For this thing to be useful for networked games anywhere but tethered to a phone right next to you, or sitting in the same room as your AP, I think you'd really need to buy an access point to keep with you, that connects to and routes through your real AP, with proper antennas.
Jonathan Yu
@dalias My SSID is an emoji, and the Switch can connect to it but not display it (it's just an empty box, lol)
Rich Felker
Overall the UX is like devices from the early days of WiFi when it was an afterthought/novelty not something you were actually expected to use. It's baffling that a current gen device behaves this way.
Rich Felker
Oh and to top it off: "Internet settings" (the only settings page you're likely to want to access often) is just off the bottom of the first page, below useless stuff like "Parental controls". So you have to scroll every time you want to try to get it to connect or inspect the status. 🤦
Rich Felker
Like, this is a portable device. The expectation is ppl want to use it on trains, on planes, in hotels, at friends' houses, etc. Internet config is not a one-time thing.
Rich Felker
@jawnsy I think you can, but proxy AP would be physical-UX better. Cables plugged into a device while it's in use are a disaster in the making.
Jonathan Yu
@dalias I wonder if you could plug it into wired Ethernet if you had a USB C adapter
Rich Felker
@chrisvest This must be game specific because it's not a thing I've seen.
Chris Vest
@dalias It also can’t play any online games if sitting behind a NAT, which is how most internet connections in Europe work. Depending on the NAT type you can maybe work around this by connecting it directly to the open internet through the modem, but that’s kind of uncomfortable.
Rich Felker
@leo Well Apple outright forked FreeBSD and somehow managed to break lots of stuff that was fine on FreeBSD... 🤷 🤡
leo vriska :light2:
@dalias iirc the tcp/ip stack was fairly directly ported from freebsd so i assume that's fine. their wifi and nat traversal code could really use improvement though
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.