Hi.

I'm looking for Linux friendly USB wireless adapters.

What are great dongles that work out of the box or just need a package like firmware-ralink or firmware-realtek, etc.?

Look here:

http://www.wirelesshack.org/top-linu...-adapters.html

A lot of the wireless adapters work out of the box now but if yours doesn't most likely all you would need to do is install the driver for the dongle and reboot.

If it still doesn't work than you will have to blacklist the driver for the onboard wifi card.

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Sometimes I go to my online stores and put in usb wifi linux as search then peek.
Some products may be sold under many different names so the chip inside becomes the search term.

Remember that a few things control usb nic's. One is kernel level. Two is drivers in kernel that your distro has. Three is generally how opensource the maker is. While you can usually add in drivers for many popular brands, it is sometimes kind of a pain.

Lastly is a way that has somewhat fallen out of favor. That is to use windows drivers under ndiswrapper. In theory any windows driver could have worked on linux but the what on that project is slow.

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ThinkPenguin sells USB adapters guaranteed to work with Linux. I needed one once, got it from them, and it worked like a charm.

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Are there any wireless USB dongle brands that tend to be more friendly to Linux?

For example, with printers I know HP tend to be more Linux friendly.

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AFAIK TP-Link and Think Penguin like frankbell posted should be friendly.
As frankbell said, Think Penguin works right out of the box.

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Pluggable claims to be linux friendly also.

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I use Addon NWU271 WiFi 11n USB sticks & TP-LINK TL-WN822N desktop USB wifi with Linux, OpenBSD, & my sister's Windows box.

http://www.addon-tech.com/new_/product/html/?55.html
http://uk.tp-link.com/products/detai...TL-WN822N.html

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I'm considering one of these:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Network-AWU...dp/B004Y6MIXS/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/ALFA-Networ.../dp/B00REZPU3G

Of those 2, I'd choose the ALFA Network AWUS051NH V2 as it claims to be compatible with Linux, (the other one only mentions Windows).

Regarding the one that does not mention Linux -- commenters do mention that it runs fine in Linux though.

The one in the second link looks good and mentions Linux.

I've had to return items before to Amazon and they are pretty good about it.
That is if you need to return it.

Are dongles with antennas generally a lot better than regular dongles?

I used to have a wifi dongle that the connection would drop regularly. (Lyksys)

However when I installed my wifi card with the antennas the dropped wifi connection became a thing of the past.

This is just one instance. Other members may have had different results.

Antennas definitely help.