Hello hello ello, so sorry to bother ya’ll but I have no clue what to do now and I dont have enough info to submit a bug report so I thought I’d trouble the forum with my woes…
I use Arch Linux on both my desktops with plasma installed one is a core i5 3470 (Old System) and one is a core i7 12700 (New System) I recently updated both to the latest version of plasma.
After the update both would not connect to my wifi network. My wifi is in wpa2 and wpa3 mixed mode and both the systems were recognising it as wpa3. Even nmtui didn’t work to connect to the wifi.
I did a couple troubleshooting steps on the old system (removed the connections, added them back manually, tried connecting to my phone hotspot in wpa2 only mode, changed the wifi dongle) and finally installed xfce4 to use my browser and try to fix it.
Installing xfce4 and connecting to wifi using xfce worked to fix the issue on the old system and plasma continued working normally even after I did a pacman -Rcsu xfce4
But nothing I do is fixing this issue on my new system. When I install xfce internet works within xfce but doesn’t fix it in plasma. And sometimes it connects to the wifi network but then states no internet access and nmcli show devices says the network is stuck in getting ip addresses.
journalctl -u NetworkManager is no help either.
I even reinstalled arch and tried to fix the issue but that doesnt work either. Installing the plasma-desktop package and connecting to networking with nmtui works but installing plasma-meta breaks everything.
If anyone can chime in with any ideas I’d be greatly obliged, sorry again for the trouble
That is a weird problem. WPA3/2 mixed mode could be quite uncommon as there are devices known to have trouble with mixed mode Access Points so many don’t use it, so maybe this scenario hasn’t been tested that much.
From what you describe (NetworkManager working in xfce but not in plasma) my intuition would point to plasma-nm. One could uninstall that with pacman -R plasma-nm plasma-meta plasma-welcome and then try again with nmtui within Plasma.
In a report like this it’d probably help to include more specific information. For example the actual messages of journalctl at the time of the failure, the wifi hardware and driver used (sudo lshw), the nmcli message at failure.
This is definitely a very niche issue, that’s why I didn’t want to bother the devs with a bug report without knowing if it is user error : )
I live on a farm and use mobile hotspot connected to a range extender as my wifi, this range extender is stuck in wpa2/wpa3 mixed mode and I unfortunately cannot set it to be wpa2 only.
Range Extender - TPLink AC750 Wifi Range Extender (was gonna include links but apparently I cannot)
Wireless Dongle - TPLink TL-WN722N High Gain Wireless USB Adapter
I did pacman -Rdd plasma-nm networkmanager-qt plasma-meta plasma-welcome but no bueno, the issue persists.
I also completely reinstalled arch and installed only plasma-desktop instead of meta and the issue is still present!
Attached are the journalctl logs for networkmanager and I photoshopped in the lshw network results as well because new users cannot upload more than one image. (I was gonna copy and paste the text but that becomes huge and borderline unreadable so I attached images instead)
Digging through the whole network manager log I did find this line Jun 25 14:43:26 DaVinci NetworkManager[589]: <warn> [1750842806.8189] dispatcher: (10) failed (after 0.007 sec): Could not activate remote peer 'org.freedesktop.nm_dispatcher': activation request failed: unit is invalid
But this only happened once and never appears again in the logs so maybe it is some kind of fluke…
Nmtui refuses to connect to the network within plasma and asks me for wifi password sometimes or just flat out refuses to connect.
I think this is a plasma core specific problem because I do not have these issues on any other desktop environments or even a shell session (perhaps something with kdewallet or libsecret?).
I am using cinnamon as a temp environment but it is a bit sad since this issue persists on my main work PC. My old computer (using the same USB wifi dongle same driver and connecting to the same network) somehow magically got fixed…
Thank you so much for your help though Lenzoid! Do you think maybe I have enough information for a bug report?
Could be an issue in the driver that only appears in plasma because of different behavior. In the configuration where it’s working does it connect via WPA2?
Edit: If that is the case, tell plasma NetworkManager to use WPA2 via the GUI.
Edit: Reading up on the situation, because I also recently wasted hours on trying to get a Realtek Wireless adapter to work, I want to highlight this by the author of the USB-WiFi project for Linux:
Your device has the Realtek RTL8188EUS chipset. You can gather that from TPLink TL-WN722N + rtl8xxxu from lshw. From what I can tell there is a lot of info about this (looking for “RTL8188EUS wpa3 supplicant fail” online) issue so what I would do (since I’m lazy) is first try a different dongle. You can also search around online for hours trying to solve the problem with your $10 USB dongle.
As we can learn on morrownr’s github is that Realtek, TP-Link and D-Link have poor Linux support, contribute very little to Linux kernel while making millions on the back of Linux infrastructure (btw have you heard of a small company called Nvidia?). Users are then left to wonder why their devices aren’t working right while hundreds of volunteers are supposed to pick up the slack!? I say no thank you, Sir. The easiest solution for people who value their time is to buy Wifi adapter devices known to work in Linux.
Don’t get me wrong the solution is probably somewhere in wpa_supplicant or some other config and likely just a few lines (as always) but figuring that out would take me hours, and a new device costs way less plus you support companies that actually support Linux and supply proper kernel drivers.
Aw shucks then mate seems I’m out of luck for now. I think I’ll go ahead and submit a bug report and maybe hope and pray that the wpa-supplicant issue gets resolved in the next update of plasma.
I don’t think I can justify the purchase of another network card at the moment. What sucks is when I purchased the tplink one I checked and it specifically mentioned Linux compatibility.
Perhaps this is hyprland calling out to me to switch to the dark side of Linux ricing…
Thank you for the further reading resources I will definitely spend a couple hours troubleshooting when I get the time.
Ps - I replied to the kdediscuss alert email (it said I could reply to the email and I assumed it would convert my email to a post on this thread.) But I can’t see it so I’ve attached an image of the email : )
Please don’t make a bug report unless you’re sure where the problem actually comes from. Since it’s neither working in plasma nor in Gnome (at least that’s what you said) the problem likely isn’t found in plasma directly, so I wouln’t report a bug just yet.
For a bug report to be actionable one needs to pinpoint the exact source of the problem or make it reproducible for a developer.
No no, internet works perfectly fine in gnome. My bad I phrased the previous part about gnome horribly.
What I meant to say is that, I installed gnome to try and replicate the issue (to see if gnome fails to connect to the internet) and I could not replicate the issue. That is, gnome, xfce, cinnamon, hyprland, cutefish, cosmic and mate all work perfectly with my USB dongle and connect to the internet using wpa3 just fine.
Even plasma version 6.3 was 100% functional. The issue is plasma specific and has started after the upgrade to v6.4. That is why I would classify this as a bug. I’m not gonna halfheartedly just chuck a “plasma not working” message onto bugzilla, I’m trying to get more info from those posts you linked and see if I can find the culprit of this network issue.
Yep that was one of the first things I tried. No effect.
Considering that the problem exists even in plasma-desktop (the minimal version of plasma which does not ship with network management features) I believe it is an issue with either plasma shell or with the KDE secrets app, kwallet.
Im gonna change the network manager (I’ll install connman and iwr maybe) and see if this is a network manager specific issue, if the issue persists I think that will confirm that the issue is with some component or config in plasma itself.
Its currently midnight for me, so imma catch a couple z’s. I’ll test with different network managers tomorrow morning and report back
hope I find a solution…