[SOLVED] Wi-Fi Dropping on FW 13 w/ Ubuntu (AMD)

On Windows it does just work. The issue here is Linux, and the fixes take some time to roll out. This is a Linux specific thing, for the most part.

@Matt_Hartley thanks for weighing in! I’m at work now and will be able to respond later today and I’ll also try running sudo dmesg | grep mt7921e to check, whether the manual FW update has been loaded.

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So, I ran sudo dmesg | grep mt7921e and I had the same build times as @Aaron_Fenyes , which is why I believe, that the firmware update hasn’t loaded. Makes sense, since I have constant Wi-Fi drops at home.

Since @Mario_Limonciello is the only one, that got the updated firmware to load and is also on Noble, I’m assuming the latter is the reason for it to work for him.

I’m not sure, what to do now. Maybe I’ll switch to Windows or Fedora, until the bug has been fixed.

Or would it make sense to upgrade to Ubuntu Noble? I’m asking because for privacy reasons I’d rather not use Windows and I use the Signal messenger a lot, which is only officially supported for Ubuntu/Debian and macOS/Windows.

The updated firmware is already part of Noble—I think that’s why Mario has it.

If you’re interested in trying a new distribution, you might consider Debian, which Ubuntu is based on. I have the impression that a lot of bug-fixes that affect Ubuntu are available sooner in Debian. We could ask Mario how stable Noble is right now. It’s under development, so it’s likely to have some hiccups—but the bugs affecting your hardware seem worse. (By the way, are you still getting the shutdowns on lid close and the gjs.console crash pop-ups? Did those start before or after you tried to add the new firmware files to /lib/firmware/updates?)

As a possible temporary fix, I’m going to try booting into a 6.2 kernel, because one comment in the bug report mentioned the problem only showing up after upgrading from 6.2 to 6.5. The package manager tends to keep old kernel images around—I think for situations like this. You can see which kernel images you have available by calling dpkg --list | grep linux-image. I’ll report back on how it goes.

Okay, booting into a 6.2 kernel doesn’t seem feasible, because I can’t get a GRUB menu—only the GRUB command line. My attempts to boot from the command line have failed, and the procedure is finicky enough that I wouldn’t recommend it even if it worked for me.

Loading new firmware binaries still looks like the most promising strategy, unfortunately. I’ve asked for help with this on Ask Ubuntu, because it doesn’t seem hardware-specific.

I thought about going with Debian, but since it’s not officially supported by FW, I decided not to.

Yeah, good question. @Mario_Limonciello do you think Noble is stable enough for me to use as a noob and I’ll be better off than with 22.04?

I haven’t gotten the shutdown on lid close since yesterday, but I still get the gjs.console crash and I noticed, that it occurs after every restart.

Tbh, I can’t say anymore if the two issues started before or after I tried the manual firmware update for the Mediatek Wi-Fi module.

And thanks for trying out downgrading the Kernel! I thought about doing that too, after I read about it in the bug report. Bummer, that it didn’t work.

To add to my pain, my FW 13 now started to develop the issue of randomly turning up the fans to 100% for a second and then going back to normal speed. Many other people seem to have the same issue [TRACKING] AMD FW13 fan speed jumps up high, drops quickly back to low / off - #22 by Sean3

Also, my FW froze today and I had to force it to shutdown by long-pressing the power button.

So yeah, that was the last straw, I’d say. As much as I believe in the philosophy, staff and community of the Framework and really want it to succeed, this has been the worst experience I had with a computer ever.

I’m going to return it and get a MacBook or an Ubuntu certified Dell XPS. The last days really felt like clinging to a toxic relationship, that I desperately wanted to work.

No; don’t use noble right now if you’r new to Linux. You should stick with Fedora or Ubuntu.

This is sad to hear! Before you give up, could you try Fedora? It’s got a newer kernel, lots more fixes not yet picked up by Ubuntu, and it’s got the updated firmware. I think you might have a better experience.

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Unfortunately, Fedora is not an option even though, I would have actually preferred it over Ubuntu, because my workflow includes using the Signal messenger a lot and sadly, Signal only offers a native .deb for Signal on Linux.

There is a Flatpak version, that is made by the community, but since this includes a third party being involved, my security needs aren’t met by it.

It’s ugly - but if signal is the only thing keeping you off Fedora you can use alien to convert a deb to an rpm.

I thought about that too, but that would also increase my attack vector, since I have to trust in alien now. I’m in it security, if you couldn’t tell haha

I’m going to return it and get a MacBook or an Ubuntu certified Dell XPS.

I can vouch for the Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu pre-installed—I’ve been using one for the past seven years. Although I had some hiccups at the beginning (I ended up disabling Dell’s update repository to get out of a dependency log-jam), and I never got the audio system working perfectly, my overall experience was really good. (If I’m not mistaken, I may have @Mario_Limonciello to thank for that too!)

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It’s packaged by the Signal Foundation, so it should be exactly as reputable as using their deb.

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Unfortunately, it isn’t. Flathub is being misleading here.

If you scroll down you see this note: " This app is developed in the open by a community of volunteers, and released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 only."

You can look at all of Alien’s source code though and compile it yourself. And if you don’t trust alien, there’s always just extracting the deb using dpkg-deb -x foo and running it from a local directory.

:slight_smile:

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FWIW the flatpak is pretty transparently just an installation of the “official” .deb:

...
sources:
      - type: file
        dest-filename: signal-desktop.deb
        url: https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt/pool/s/signal-desktop/signal-desktop_6.47.0_amd64.deb
        sha256: 944b0f0e8603997c0357bfb8cb7d11fa754e955adc267623cbe089a50b493962
...
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No, that just means the flatpack is setup with an FOSS license.

What I was referring to was the by Signal Foundation and the FQDN of org.signal.Signal.
:thinking: Which honestly doesn’t mean much…

Looking at the repo, it’s an automated build that takes the signal deb, uses apt to extract it, and then bundle it in a flatpak.

:thinking: Yes, you can install apt in fedora. So you can use the official apt package from fedora and manually download and verify that the deb is legit, and then use apt to install it.

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Any thoughts on installing the Noble version of linux-firmware from a .deb? How likely is this to make my Jammy system unusable, and how would I recover if it did? @Loell_Framework, @Matt_Hartley (when you’re back in office on Monday)—is anyone on the support team brave enough to try this?

Can you build it yourself on Fedora?

Okay, I see. I’ll think about it! Thanks for the suggestions :slight_smile:

The fix for the bug is in jammy-proposed now, so I enabled jammy-proposed and installed it, but unfortunately the firmware update still didn’t load as indicated by the build times.

I tried again, but got this output linux-firmware is already the newest version (20220329.git681281e4-0ubuntu3.28). Selected version '20220329.git681281e4-0ubuntu3.28' (Ubuntu:22.04/jammy-proposed [all]) for 'linux-firmware'

I don’t really understand, why I still don’t have the updated firmware.

Does anyone here have an idea or can try installing the firmware update via jammy-proposed themselves?