Wifi: Intel Wireless 8265 barely working in 6.0 Rock

Hello,

Requirements:

I have Searched the forum for my issue and found nothing related or helpful
I have checked the Resources category (Resources Index)
I have reviewed the Wiki for relevant information
I have read the the Release Notes and Errata

OpenMandriva Lx version:

6.0 Rock

Desktop environment (KDE, LXQT…):

KDE Plasma 6.3.4, on X11

Description of the issue (screenshots if relevant):

I saw activity here in English-language Support in April of this year about wifi not being recognized at all, and that an upstream fix in the kernel, patched in at OM, fixed it. This is different, because my wifi was instantly recognized but is working slowly and intermittently.

Wifi works but is extremely slow.

The system tray display for wifi never shows more than one arc for signal and sometimes shows none while trying to reconnect.

dnf activity sometimes waited and timed out during a system update and an installation of a new-to-this-system package that had several new-to-this-system dependencies (from the OM 6.0 Rock repository).

My VPN’s app (Proton) sometimes shows a loss of connection.

My Android smartphone has been connected to wifi at full strength the whole time.

Would updating firmware from Intel help me?

Thanks.

Edit: My repository setting is for Rock, honest!

Relevant information (hardware involved, software version, logs or output…):

Laptop computer: Dell 7480

From the KDE Plasma Info Center, under PCI:

02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 8265 / 8275 (rev 78)
Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device 0050
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 133
Memory at ec000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
Capabilities:
Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi
Kernel modules: iwlwifi

You could try checking to see if the iwlwifi-agn-ucode package which contains iwlwifi firmware microcode is installed using: dnf info iwlwifi-agn-ucode

$ dnf info iwlwifi-agn-ucode
Last metadata expiration check: 0:09:12 ago on Thu 19 Jun 2025 20:14:05 BST.
Installed Packages
Name         : iwlwifi-agn-ucode
Version      : 20250413
Release      : 1
Architecture : noarch
Size         : 89 M
Source       : kernel-firmware-20250413-1.src.rpm
Repository   : @System
From repo    : release-znver1
Summary      : Nonfree iwlwifi firmware files for the Linux kernel
URL          : https://www.kernel.org/
License      : GPLv2
Description  : This package contains all the iwlwifi wireless firmware files
             : supported by the iwlwifi kernel driver. That means all of:
             : iwlwifi-1xx/1000/2xxx/5xxx/6xxx*.ucode firmwares.

If it is not installed, then you could go ahead and install it to see if that results in any change: sudo dnf in iwlwifi-agn-ucode followed by rebooting afterwards and see if that makes any difference.

You may find that the iwlwifi-agn-ucode package is already installed, in which case this issue will need further troubleshooting.

1 Like

Thank you @uro . I did
$ dnf info iwlwifi-agn-ucode
and I got

Description : This package contains all the iwlwifi wireless firmware files
: supported by the iwlwifi kernel driver. That means all of:
: iwlwifi-1xx/1000/2xxx/5xxx/6xxx*.ucode firmwares.

What should I look at next?

If you run dnf info iwlwifi-agn-ucode look for the line that says Installed size : 89.0 MiB.

Or run rpm -qa | grep iwlwifi. That command lists any installed rpm’s with iwlwifi in the package name like this on my laptop (Cooker system):

$ rpm -qa | grep iwlwifi
iwlwifi-agn-ucode-20250413-1.noarch

That is a fairly old wireless device, the driver was added to Linux kernel 4.6 which was a long time ago.

First try disconnecting and reconnecting the wifi connection with out the VPN enabled and see if that helps. If it does then try with the VPN again

Or you can try removing the current wireless connection and rebooting and setting a new connection. You can go to SystemSettings>Networking>Wifi and Internet to remove the current connection. Then reboot, select the network icon in Menu Panel system tray, select your connection, click on it and follow what NetworkManager tells you to do to reconfigure your connection. NetworkManager can be finicky or persnickety sometimes.

One can find SystemSettings>Networking>Wifi from the wifi icon in the dialog window that pops up in the upper right hand corner.

If none of this helps there are more technical things to get into.

Edit: Oh, maybe a long shot, but sometimes I see the wifi icon with a tiny red ?. If you see that and run the command nmcli g you will see under CONNECTIVITY the work limited you want that to be full not limited. For me this corrects that, fortunately rare, problem: Run:

nmcli networking connectivity check

and you should see:

$ nmcli g
STATE      CONNECTIVITY  WIFI-HW  WIFI     WWAN-HW  WWAN     METERED
connected  full          enabled  enabled  missing  enabled  no (guessed)