Qualcomm AX cards are very stable on Linux.
Problems I had with other cards:
- AX210, AX200. High power consumption when power-saving modes are enabled. Not dissimilar to this: Linux on the Dell XPS: Fixing AX201 Wi-Fi performance | Jonathan Bowman. The experience was pretty sordid.
- Mediatek RZ616. General packet loss issues after resuming from sleep. My general impression of the company from embedded/mobile devices is poor, I only have this as the laptop came with it.
- QCNFA222. I tried this in response to the above issues, reasoning that if any driver’s going to work well, it’s ath9k, the original free Linux wireless driver. I had problems with packet loss and other issues after resuming from sleep which were hard to pin down. I wrote about these elsewhere, AMD IOMMU seems to be a problem, sometimes the card was only operational after rebooting.
(My sense is that some of these issues may arise from the interaction with the AMD platform firmware, but it’s hard to say.)
I have that NFA765 card as well as a Compex WLT639. WLT639 has Bluetooth on UART which doesn’t appear to be routed operational on Framework 16, I can’t tell from the datasheet if it goes anywhere useful. It is an industrial/embedded card with higher transmit power and I use it for wireless hotspots. Performance on these is very good and NFA765 is considerably cheaper than successor 865 and easy to source locally. Linux wireless has always been difficult and prone to these sort of issues due to disinterest from manufacturers, so I really value stable and consistent performance. Speed is excellent.
I also have a U-blox NXP (ex-Marvell) card, but they are not suitable for most laptops as the driver support is not in mainline and they use the larger U.FL antennae. These have good performance but are for industrial/embedded/networking e.g. set-top boxes or networking gizmos.