I’m having this problem with my wifi connection on my laptop. When I installed Fedora 43 KDE, I was using my laptop as a desktop PC with a wired connection (ethernet), and never bothered my wifi. Yesterday i had to take to my laptop elsewhere to use it, and to my horror, I could not locate the “Networks” icon as shown below:
Furthermore, i could not right-click to the icon in order to activate wifi such as below:
All I’m seeing in the taskbar/panel is a different icon looking like a monitor with a cable around it instead of the icon mentioned above, and when i right-click on it i see the menu below:
Some WiFi hardware uses proprietary drivers that are available in Windows but not Fedora. You may need to install inxi. Another way to check if your WiFi hardware works in Linux is to search for your laptop model at https://linux-hardware.org. Note that the site is often overloaded — maybe by AI data scrapers — so patience is needed.
The wifi of this laptop has worked previously (on Windows). I checked the wifi on UEFI and the Wifi is on. I have also run a diagnostics check in UEFI for the Wifi and it passed. I have also installed inxi and here is the result:
Avoid vendors that do not provide details of the chips and antenna ports. You want vendor and device ID’s. Use them to search on https://linux-hardware.org to see if the card works on linux with “in-kernel” drivers.
