Wifi wont stay connected on 2015 MacBook Air

Ask Fedora
1

I decided to get into Linux recently by installing Mint on my old MacBook Air recently, however I kept having issues with connectivity. I would boot up and have wifi for a while, but then it would drop out and refuse to reconnect. I installed a fork of Fedora on my desktop and really liked it, so i decided to give it a shot on my MacBook, hoping it would fix my issues, but no such luck. Same issue on Fedora. I cant for the life of me figure out why this keeps happening. Drivers, kernal, etc are up to date. Ive looked at network settings, power save settings, etc, but still nothing. I dont seem to have the problem when I use an external bluetooth dongle, but when i use the on board network card, it refuses to stay connected. Im about ready to tear my hair out. Ive been trying to figure this out for weeks. Anybody have any idea why this is happening?

2

There have been many recent changes to linux aimed at reducing power consumption because it is an issue selling large quantities for use in cubicle farms. This has caused issues with wifi and Bluetooth on older laptops from many vendors. A easy and popular workaround is to disable power saving options, but that assumes you have AC power while using the laptop. It is up to the user community to find better solutions. Since MB Air used the same wifi hardware for several years, it has a large user community which increases the chances that real fixes will appear.

3

Hi Jay,

Welcome to Fedora :slight_smile:

Have you tried this yet:
As root or sudo

  1. create a file /etc/NetworkManager/wifi-powersave.conf
  2. The file needs the following 2 lines
    [connection]
    wifi.powersave = 2
  3. save the file and reboot

Other possible valuse for wifi.powersave = {n}
NM_SETTING_WIRELESS_POWERSAVE_DEFAULT (0): use the default value
NM_SETTING_WIRELESS_POWERSAVE_IGNORE (1): don’t touch existing setting
NM_SETTING_WIRELESS_POWERSAVE_DISABLE (2): disable powersave
NM_SETTING_WIRELESS_POWERSAVE_ENABLE (3): enable powersave

Also

Not sure this still applies but …

4

A 2015 MBA should be on the open-source version of the Broadcom driver, baked into the kernel.

However, just to be sure, can you post the output of:

lspci |  grep -i -E 'VGA|3D|Display' | cut -b1-7 | xargs -i lspci -vnnks {} | grep -v "<access denied>"