In as much detail and providing any resources explain if it is better to use your in-built wifi card or to use a wifi adapter? (Given the fact the laptop and/or wifi adapter are either new or second hand)
If it makes a difference, the two scenarios are one in which home wifi + public wifi is used or only public wifi is used.
Good day,
there is no real difference hardware wise other then “swapability”. Wether a network adapter is attached via USB externally, via mPCIe or via USB over mPCIe (which is quite often the case actually) doesn’t make a difference, except for, that you of course can change an external card faster. This can be important though, to change your MAC-address easily, something you may do via terminal as well, however.
Have a nice day,
Ego
I may have recalled this mistakenly but doesn’t the USB increase the surface area for exploitation?
Kind regards
Good day,
Using a network adapter via USB doesn’t increase you surface of attack over PCIe. What you might mean could be, that for really security critical machines, it’s best to remove USB ports all together, simply to limit access from outside. Though this is a completely different problematic.
Have a nice day,
Ego
Due to USB exploitation surface, Qubes (ideally… there are still technical issues…) puts USB into its own VM… And then uses pvusb… Just as it puts the physical network adapters into their own VM (sys-net).