weird networking issue on Asus E1404FA
This is probably gonna sound ridiculous. I've tried posting this before but it didn't get to see the light of the day. I'm gonna try this again, and ask if any of you have had similar situations to mine.
Again, this is gonna sound ridiculous, so ridicule me if you want.
As stated on the title, I have an Asus vivobook don't go E1404FA, it's a generic low-end laptop that has barely enough power to do stuff on windows. So, near the end of March, I decided to install Linux Mint along with windows, essentially dual-booting. While I enjoyed the experience on Linux Mint after a while, I was using USB tethering the whole time since the network card; the MT7902 wasn't supported by the kernel yet so there was a time when I decided to resort to OOT drivers.
Fyi, the only reason I even tried doing OOT drivers was because the USB tethering(actually, also the wifi) is just so unstable. By unstable, I mean it would do just fine for a bit, then it would suddenly no longer work, then it would suddenly come back up again.
I wasn't too sure what it was at the time, so I just installed OOT drivers thinking they would work.
But then the OOT drivers installation failed since I was an absolute noob when it came to this stuff and before I knew it, the kernel panicked, and so did I.
I then gave up on OOT drivers for a bit and decided to distro-hop to KDE Neon, where I found another funny thing about this whole instability thing. While on KDE Neon, I did more testing and researching regarding my particular instability, where I found out that I couldn't find anyone else with the same issues as me, and I also found out that if I open the KDE Plasma network manager thingy to show the speed of the internet connection, the connection gets "ressurected" and works again, until I close out of it. As another information, no, it wasn't disconnecting and reconnecting, it was always connected but there seemed to be times with no data stream at all.
I then tried pinging my own router via the terminal a few times, which resulted in quite weird results. Ping was 50% of the time fine, with it floating aroung 5-10 ms, but then 30% of the time, the ping with tthe ROUTER spikes up to thousands(1000-9000 ms) which was NOT supposed to happen fyi, and then the rest 20% was the ping not being able to ping.
I went to several LLMs to help me diagnose and fix this(sorry, guys) such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini but none worked.
Eventually I got so frustrated and then I just installed different OOT drivers, this time a backported version of the 7.1 kernel's existing MT7902 drivers. It miraculously worked.... until I realized
The instability wasn't a USB tethering problem.
It was both tethering, and wifi.
And that complicates things further.
edit 2 : this meant that this couldn't be an issue with drivers, and I also tried other distros and kernel versions and the same issue still stayed there. It works fine on windows btw.
//edit 2 end
So from that point I just decided to leave and see if Kernel 7.1 would eventually fix things(I highly doubt so), but honestly after not having linux on my computer I miss it so badly bro.
I still have 2 ext4 50 GB partitions on my nvme, just sitting there waiting for the day of the linux desktop.
If all of these sounded ridiculous, it's because it is. Ridicule me if you want, I'm not some super tech-savvy guy so I obviously did things wrong.
Thanks for reading, and please provide more information about:
- What probably happened to me
- If anyone else had this
and no, I don't have any screenshots and stuff, they won't help much.
sorry for wasting your energy to read all this lol
has anyone experienced this too and is there a solution?