Lenovo IdeaPad 5 16IRU9 with Linux Mint 22: loses wi-fi connection often

[AndreB]

I'm new to such forums so please forgive if I misbehave.
I got this new Lenovo laptop for my wife and installed Linux mint 22 right away as dual boot. It connects wi-fi fine but loses connection several times daily following minutes/hours of normal operation, then usually nothing short of reboot helps. This does not happen on the Windows 11 "side", which probably points away from a HW problem. System claims to be up-to-date. Selected technical details (from "System info"}:
System:
Kernel: 6.8.0-49-generic arch: x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 13.2.0 clocksource: tsc Desktop: Cinnamon v: 6.2.9 tk: GTK v: 3.24.41 wm: Muffin v: 6.2.0 tools: cinnamon-screensaver vt: 7 dm: LightDM v: 1.30.0 Distro: Linux Mint 22 Wilma base: Ubuntu 24.04 noble
Machine:
Type: Convertible System: LENOVO product: 83DU v: IdeaPad 5 2-in-1 16IRU9 Chassis: type: 31 v: IdeaPad 5 2-in-1 16IRU9
Network:
Device-1: Realtek RTL8852BE PCIe 802.11ax Wireless Network vendor: Lenovo driver: rtw89_8852be v: kernel pcie: speed: 2.5 GT/s lanes: 1 port: 3000 bus-ID: 03:00.0 chip-ID: 10ec:b852 class-ID: 0280 IF: wlp3s0 state: up mac: <filter> IF-ID-1: nordlynx state: unknown speed: N/A duplex: N/A mac: N/A

I will attach a complete system report if necessary.
What can I do to get the connection stable?

 

[Fanboi]

I'm not sure this is a driver issue per say (in this case it may be a very specific firmware bug). I mean you can use the card so you've got functional drivers. Nonetheless, it always requires investigation. Could you reboot your machine and post the output of dmesg | grep wlps30 ? Then when your card fails, run the command again and post that? Can you do the same with Network Manager: journalctl -xe | grep NetworkManager

Meantime, some more obvious stuff:
1. Have you tried pinging your router's gateway whatever your IP address is, the gateway is typically ".1," example "192.168.8.52" then you'd ping -c8 192.168.8.1 ... I say this because a) it'll give you an idea of the connection's stability, and b) Network Manager will complain about lack of access outside your local network, so your connection to the AP may be fine. I'm on a shared internet, so I have a router and my own subnet. When my landlord/lady's router goes down, Network Manager sometimes complains, despite being connected (IDK if my router is killing WiFi when the WAN port is "disconnected" but it is what it is).

2. Speaking of that and stability, it could be that the Linux driver or Network Manager may be losing connection and not reconnecting properly. This can happen when a connection remains "active" even though the AP disconnected. When you disconnect next, try running:
nmcli device disconnect wlp3s0 && sleep 5 && nmcli device connect wlp3s0
(post any messages).

3. Try a full purge purge but backup your APs info:
systemctl stop NetworkManager
cp -r /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections.old
rm -r /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/*
apt-get purge network-manager -y -- supposed to remove config files, but doesn't always.There are possible temp files so you may want to reboot.
apt-get install network-manager --install-suggests -y
Right, see if you can connect and it is stable. If you forgot any passwords, they're now in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections.old/ where each file is an AP.

Edit: Note that removing network-manager will remove Cinnamon (or any stock DE you installed via a metapackage). See my post below for details. The reason for this choice of dependencies eludes me (buggy package management).
If you have to do a purge and reinstall of network-manager (and I strongly suggest you first investigate the power issue mentioned by @kc1di in the post below this first) then you will have to reinstall either Cinnamon or the full Mint Cinnamon DE. I suggest the latter.You can do this by running apt-get install mint-meta-cinnamon --install-suggests either after the purge, or if you feel okay booting into the CLI, after reboot.

Hopefully the "obvious stuff" solves the issue, but if not, those outputs will be very useful in figuring out what's going on.

PS: You need root to perform most of these tasks so assume I said login with su or prepend sudo to those commands.

 

[kc1di]

I have found that often wifi disconects are cause by Network Manager power save function.
You can try disabling it this way.
In terminal copy and paste this command.

sudo sed -i 's/wifi.powersave = 3/wifi.powersave = 2/' /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf

try it for awhile that way. see if the disconnects stop. If not you can reverse the process by changing the command to read

sudo sed -i 's/wifi.powersave = 2/wifi.powersave = 3/' /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf

Good luck.

 

[AndreB]

@kc1di Thank you for the suggestion. I applied it, will see how it works. Do you happen to remember what exactly these "3" and "2" mean?

 

[theLegionWithin]

looks like they're states for wifi.powersave - some documentation I found, here: https://gist.github.com/jcberthon/ea8cfe278998968ba7c5a95344bc8b55

 

[AndreB]

@Fanboi Thank you for your response. I did the diagnostic part, results are in the 1st attached file.
For the more obvious part, results for #1 are in the second attachment. I did #2 and started #3, finding /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections directory completely empty, then after "apt-get purge network-manager -y" and rebooting, disaster struck. For some reason I started getting message "Unable to launch cinnamon-session-cinnamon X session" and had to spend some time fighting that, eventually restored all from timeshift. (Btw, would "apt-get install network-manager --install-suggests -y" work at all with network manager purged?) So I'd rather recommend against such action (unless I did something wrong). Interestingly, after all that, I still have to wait for the original freezing symptoms to occur... Results for #2 perished in the crash, I'm still waiting for a chance to repeat that, but it worked throughout the night playing Youtube clips, perhaps it had some temporary freeze but I have not seen any. Perhaps, it is a result of applying the advice from kc1di? @theLegionWithin, thanks for your finding.

 

[Fanboi]

@Fanboi Thank you for your response. I did the diagnostic part, results are in the 1st attached file.
For the more obvious part, results for #1 are in the second attachment. I did #2 and started #3, finding /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections directory completely empty, then after "apt-get purge network-manager -y" and rebooting, disaster struck. For some reason I started getting message "Unable to launch cinnamon-session-cinnamon X session" and had to spend some time fighting that, eventually restored all from timeshift. (Btw, would "apt-get install network-manager --install-suggests -y" work at all with network manager purged?) So I'd rather recommend against such action (unless I did something wrong). Interestingly, after all that, I still have to wait for the original freezing symptoms to occur... Results for #2 perished in the crash, I'm still waiting for a chance to repeat that, but it worked throughout the night playing Youtube clips, perhaps it had some temporary freeze but I have not seen any. Perhaps, it is a result of applying the advice from kc1di? @theLegionWithin, thanks for your finding.

Just booted up my Mint VM, had no issues at first, but then I considered the fact that I replaced Cinnamon with XFCE (on the Cinnamon variant, ie I did not install the XFCE variant), so it got me wondering about this behaviour as I've seen it to a much lesser degree on Debian with preconfigured DEs (based on metapackages).
Anyway, I tried installing LM Cinnamon (latest) from scratch. I ran purge on network-manager, and was shocked by the output of what packages to be removed:
cinnamon* cinnamon-dbg* mint-meta-cinnamon*
along with blueman... Now the metapackage mint-meta-cinnamon is safe to remove as it's a metapackage (just to create a bunch of dependencies as to download a software collection), however cinnamon should not have dependencies on network-manager.
So when reinstalling network-manager, obviously it won't pull cinnamon and deps back... This is a huge oversight in package management, and I'll have to report this, though if they treat it as a bug is anyone's guess. Debian does this to a much lesser degree (I've yet to kill XFCE by removing Parole). Anyway, I digress...
Aside from Timeshift, the two fixes are a) just reinstalling vanilla Cinnamon, cinnamon, or, preferable for most users, b) restoring the full Mint Cinnamon DE by installing the mint-meta-cinnamon package with --install-suggests. Will edit this into my previous post for the sake of future readers.
Nonetheless, a big sorry for the oversight I really would not have expected that weird dependency chain, but definitely something I'll have to now investigate in LMDE and pure Debian to see who's ultimately to blame (when I have time, I'll report the issue so long anyway).

Re logs: Not sure why ipv6 is disabled... Other than that, it's connecting successfully and running fine.

I think @kc1di was right on about the power config. There were some complaints about this spanning the net, but it's not an issue I've ever had, but I figured get the more obvious stuff out the way. So see how it goes, and if no issues crop up in the next week, then it probably was the power feature.