WiFi Drops Again
I had previously flailed around trying to fix occasional WiFi drops on my Pop_OS(Ubuntu) laptop. The intermittency made it hard to know if I really fixed it or not, and it turns out I hadn’t.
I installed Arch Linux on another computer here on my desk. While it sat around idle, I found it one day having lost its internet connection just like the Pop_OS machine does!
Now I knew this problem with the network connection wasn’t isolated to one machine. To recap:
-
the wired connection is fine
-
the Mac on the wireless network is fine
-
the mobile devices are fine
-
the 2 linux machines drop their connections every couple days
I started the search again for a solution with more information. I found some hints about power-saving options in NetworkManager.
On the Pop_OS machine,
there’s a configuration file,
/etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf,
that I changed to disable powersaving:
[connection] # 0: default, 1: leave untouched, 2: disable, 3: enable wifi.powersave = 2
I had to add a file to the Arch machine in the same location to hold this configuration. Now these machines have been maintaining their connections for days.