I apologize if this seems like a trivial matter, but I have a laptop (a Lenovo Ideapad 3 to be exact) and I can’t get WiFi (or Bluetooth) to work on anything other than Ubuntu 23.04 and its flavors. I tried OpenSUSE Leap and Debian 12, both couldn’t detect the built-in WiFi card. I also tried Ubuntu-based distros such as Linux Mint, KDE Neon, and Zorin OS, same problem. I tried Kubuntu 22.04 LTS and even that couldn’t detect the WiFi card! So for the mean time, I’m stuck with using Ubuntu 23.04. Any ideas to get around this? Can I use Ubuntu to figure the exact WiFi card that’s being used then download its driver? If so, how can I do that exactly? Note that my Laptop doesn’t have a built-in Ethernet port, and I don’t want to buy a USB Ethernet adapter only for it not work out of the box either! Any help would be appreciated!
You can try searching (google) for the output of lspci or lsusb: like “1234:5678 firmware”. Alternatively, search for your chip in the Linux Wireless data base.
In mint have you tried the latest kernel through update manager ?
Real question: if your WiFi doesn’t work and you don’t have a wired connection available, what do you do to update the kernel? Can you just download it on another machine and then update with a USB drive?
