Experiences with TL-WN722N

I bought TP-Link's TL-WN722N as an additional network adapter to use along with my laptop's built-in Intel-based network adapter.

The idea was to provide a second network (via an access point) for computers within my vicinity to connect to, in order to establish a home-grown private cloud for an academic project, but as with anything Realtek, things didn't go as planned.

After plugging in the Realtek-based adapter, the device was instantly recognized and lsusb was able to list it, the appropriate driver¹, i.e. r8188eu was automatically loaded, and ip showed an entry for it. iwd on the other hand just wouldn't list it.

I found mentions that some were able to get this device to work by using wpa_supplicant instead of iwd, but I am not ripping out my network stack for another just to get a network adapter to hopefully work.

iwd and systemd-networkd have been, in my experience, the most reliable combination for network management and wireless connectivity – I'm certainly not throwing that away because of Realtek.

The bottom line is that Realtek produces garbage - and you really don't deserve that.

Update: I managed to create my network by setting up a software access point with hostapd (without touching my existing network stack). I'll talk about this process in a future post.