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Today I learned: if you have an Android device with working WiFi and a Linux PC with no Internet connectivity, you can tether the Android device to the PC via USB to get connectivity on the PC, and in my experience, it just works.
in reply to Matt Campbell

To clarify, the PC is running GNOME with NetworkManager. I'm sure NetworkManager is responsible for the "just works" part.
in reply to Matt Campbell

This works on Windows too in my experience. It just treats it like any other internet device.
in reply to Matt Campbell

Yeah that would have been my question before you added that to first post, basically if you needed to add anything as I assume most OS out of the box doesn't do that or even install mobile via usb properly (so more than one thing but I might assume wrong here?)
in reply to Matt Campbell

This saved me many times when I had a WiFi adapter that required installing broadcom-wl in order to work.
in reply to Matt Campbell

Yes. Doing this on iOS is... an adventure. I don't remember the exact steps involved, I never had to do this myself but my friend did, but as far as I know, you had to somehow download the Itunes installer with your iphone, trick it into thinking that it's a photo, transfer it to the computer via MTP and then turn the photo / photos back into an installer.
in reply to Matt Campbell

If Android is connected to a 4g mobile network, it works too.
in reply to Matt Campbell

@Matt Campbell @Cleverson Do you guys know that for android 13 and older devices rndis is used for USB tethering. Since linux 6.7 that's being removed in favour of NCM which is also supported by android 14. So If you have some older android device, you might need to watch out for the kernel updates if you are relying on this functionality.
in reply to Matt Campbell

With my previous Samsung, I had to reenable the tether after every disconnect of the USB cable, which was every now and then. 😕 My current phone is able to do wifi hotspot while having a wifi uplink as well so I don't have any motivation to use any other way to tether other stuff to the phone.