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Troubleshooting wi-fi issues on GNU/Linux

LICENSE: This gist is covered by the GNU GPL v.2 or more recent license. For further information, refer to https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html

It's quite common to set up a GNU/Linux distribution on a computer only to find out wi-fi doesn't work, or to perform a software upgrade and find out the computer is no longer able to locate any wi-fi network. In this gist, I want to give some guidelines about how to troubleshoot wi-fi issues on GNU/Linux. Just a short legalese disclaimer: this piece of advice is offered with absolutely NO warranties whatsoever, and from this point on you are following my advice at your owk risk and danger. That being said, I am not liable for any damage or loss that might happen as a result of following this guide. You take full responsibility for the consequences of following this troubleshooting guide.

1: Know the hardware you're working with

Troubleshooting any kind of hardware-related issue without knowin

Arch Linux tweaks

This is a collection of the tweaks and modification I've made to my Arch Linux installation over the months. These may be applicable to other distros, but please check first before doing anything. I also included Arch Wiki references for all the procedures I mentioned. My recommendation is not to blindly follow this gist but to always check with the Arch Linux wiki first. Things move fast and by the time you're reading this my gist may be out of date. Lastly, the golden rule: never execute a command you don't understand.

Installing the KDE Plasma desktop

My current DE of choice is KDE's Plasma. I find it just about perfect.

There are various ways to install it on Arch. The most popular one is to install plasma and plasma-applications, but I don't like doing that because it comes with too many programs I'll never use. I, instead, install the base plasma group, remove the few extra packages that come with it, then I finish off by installing a few KDE apps that don't come with th

Setting up podman rootless containers on Arch Linux

Podman is a container engine that is similar to and fully compatible with Docker that has the peculiarity of not requiring a daemon to run and to allow for rootless containers, which are often deemed safer than privileged containers running as root. Podman is a drop-in replacement for Docker that even supports the same syntax and it has good support from Red Hat.

However, running podman rootless containers on Arch Linux may not be obvious, so I'm writing the instructions I have used to achieve that here.

Podman works using control groups and users from which said containers need to be launched need to be assigned an appropriate range of subordinate user and group IDs. On Arch Linux, these files are not present and they need to be created.

From a root shell:

⚙️🐧 Framework 16 comprehensive Linux set-up gist

The Framework Laptop 16 is my new laptop of choice that I purchased to replace my dying older machine. While this laptop enjoys official Linux support, there are still a few things to take care of post-install.

Hardware configuration

This might be useful for people who stumble onto this gist to debug. My laptop is configured as such, with notes on the Linux support:

Update 05/11/2024

The Obsidian package on Flathub defaults to Electron 32 now, which fixes the problem it used to have in Wayland mode. Also, should one want to run it in X11 mode for any reason, Fedora 41 released with GNOME 47, enabling its new xwayland-native-scaling feature, that finally makes XWayland apps crisp in fractional scaling scenarios. For all intents and purposes, either of these two advancements obsolete this gist.

Obsidian has had a long-standing bug open for a couple years now. The problem with this bug is that, when Obsidian is running in Wayland mode, it is not possible to drag tabs around, tile them, or move them around in any way. The only way to restore this functionality is to run Obsidian in X11 mode, through XWayland. Sadly, doing that degrades the experience on HiDPI setups with fractional scaling enabled, bec

	#!/bin/bash

	container='ubuntu'
	cmd="${1:-run}"
	bold=$(tput bold)
	normal=$(tput sgr0)

	if (( $EUID != 0 )); then
	sudo "$(realpath $0)" "$@"
	exit $?