My desktop PC is the only machine in the house having Wi-Fi connectivity issues (connects fine, but drops out randomly after a few minutes or sometimes a few hours)
I think wpa_supplicant is getting confused and thinks signal strength is poor (I have a Netgear mesh, but this seems increasingly common, so it’s weird for that to be the issue)
I did pick up a TP-Link USB Wi-Fi adapter, but can reproduce the same connectivity issues
The fix was switching away from wpa_supplicant in favour of iwd, which seems rock solid in comparison
I’m sure there’s a way to fix wpa_supplicant, but it’s man pages only seem to list the options without actually describing what they do, which seems sort of poor considering how old the project is 🤷
A somehow old (2021) but interesting article about why the community is moving from wpa-supplicant to iwd: https://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2021/243/iNet-Wireless-Daemon
Here is an excerpt of interest: “The description of the iwd project on www.kernel.org highlights simplicity as an important factor behind iwd’s recent rise: “The core goal of the project is to optimize resource utilization: storage, runtime memory, and link-time costs. This is accomplished by not depending on any external libraries and utilizing features provided by the Linux Kernel to the maximum extent possible. The result is a self-contained environment that only depends on the Linux Kernel and the runtime C library.””
ArchLinux and Ubuntu respectively tested iwd on July 2020 and in Ubuntu 20.10.
iwd is great. In fact I’d say take it a step further and get rid of the beast that is NetworkManager as well.
