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!

  • josephsh5OP
    3·
    10 months ago

    Thank you for the clarification. I already know that most drivers are loaded with the kernel, and it looks like Ubuntu 23.04 is using a slightly newer kernel than other mainstream distros.

    What you do once you’re on the 24.04 LTS release is up to you. By that time, other distros will probably also work out of the box too.

    That’s a very good question. It is because I was using Kubuntu 23.04, and I was mostly happy with it, except for one small gripe I was facing related to KDE, and I figured if I try a different distro with KDE, I might actually solve it.

    • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
      41·
      10 months ago

      You know you can install KDE/Plasma on Ubuntu, right? There’s no need to reinstall the whole thing just to change the DE.