[FIXED] Omarchy WiFi on 2011 MacBook Air – Broadcom BCM43224 severe packet loss

I just got Omarchy running really well on a 2011 13" MacBook Air (MacBookAir4,2), but WiFi took quite a bit of troubleshooting, so I'm posting the solution in case someone else runs into this.

Hardware:

• MacBook Air 13", Mid 2011 (MacBookAir4,2)
• Broadcom BCM43224 [14e4:4353]
• Fresh Omarchy install

The symptom

WiFi appeared to work normally. It connected to my AP, got a DHCP address, default route and DNS worked.

But actual connectivity was nearly unusable.

Pinging my local gateway showed anywhere from 20–75% packet loss, sometimes 100%, with latency occasionally measured in seconds.

So if you have an older Mac where Omarchy says WiFi is connected but websites time out or everything feels incredibly slow, check the local connection first:

ping -c 30 <your-router-ip>

In my case the problem was the default brcmsmac driver.

I tried disabling WiFi power saving and also tried removing the omarchy.network widget because there's another BCM43224 issue involving repeated WiFi scans. Neither fixed this particular machine.

The fix

I switched the BCM43224 from brcmsmac to Broadcom's proprietary wl driver using:

• broadcom-wl-dkms
• dkms
• linux-headers matching the currently running kernel
• pahole

Important: run uname -r and make sure your linux-headers version EXACTLY matches the running kernel.

That caused me some grief because I initially had headers / a precompiled broadcom-wl module for a newer kernel. wlinstalled but couldn't load.

Using broadcom-wl-dkms with the correct headers solved that because DKMS built the driver specifically for my running kernel.

After DKMS successfully built wl, I switched drivers:

sudo modprobe -r brcmsmac b43 bcma

sudo modprobe wl

The difference was immediate.

Before:
20–75% packet loss to my own router, multi-second latency, frequent timeouts.

After:
0% packet loss, ~6ms average latency to the router, normal Internet performance.

To make it persistent I blacklisted:

b43
b43legacy
brcmsmac
bcma
ssb

and configured wl to load at boot.

I then updated the whole system with pacman -Syu, rebooted, and verified that DKMS rebuilt/retained the driver.

After reboot:

• wl loads automatically
• WiFi reconnects automatically
• 0% packet loss
• Omarchy's normal network widget works fine

So if you're trying to give an old 2011-era MacBook Air a new life with Omarchy and have a BCM43224 [14e4:4353], broadcom-wl-dkms may be the answer.

Hopefully this saves someone else the troubleshooting rabbit hole I went through.