First time poster
 

Newbie here... I got into Linux with UBUNTU 16.04. I like 16.04 because it reminds me of Windows XP. It's sort of simple for me to understand.

I've not had to fix anything on it for two years, until it crashed the other day. So I decided to update to 18.04. Bad move. Now I don't know where anything is and my WIFI only has about 6-50Mb/s for what ever reason.

I'm not a techy by any means, but is there something inherently wrong with this distribution? There are pages and pages of NO WIFI with 18.04. I've searched for several days and tried what I've found to no avail.

Is there a real fix for this or should I go back to 16.04?

Welcome to LQ.

The wifi issue is not a Linux issue; it's a manufacturer issue.

Some manufacturers of wireless chipsets provide better support for Linux than others. Broadcom (which is much favored by Dell) and Realtek, in particular, tend to be problematic. It's not that they won't work with Linux, it's that several extra steps may be required to get them working. Intel Inside generally works out-of-the-box.

this maybe an opportunity to go disto hunting just , why not? Broadcom, yeah Ubuntututu and Broadcom I had a netbook I had to mount the iso and craw into the dir use fake root and,... lucky I had a phone with wifi so I could read all of them instructions to get my wifi working.

When you say that you installed 18.04, did you do the upgrade in-situ using Ubuntu's upgrader or did you do a fresh install?

if you prefer the classical desktop paradigm, you might consider switching to a supported version of Xubuntu. i suggest 18.04 LTS.

as for your wifi problems; if you consider reinstalling, do that first, then, if it still "doesn't work", show us what is asked for here.

PS: your search-fu must be poor, there's a million posts of people having wifi problems on any version of ubuntu.

Commenting on that snap fu, No wifi and it is telling the user to install rfkill, so he /she can open up the hardware catch 22,

I need wifi in order to download rfkill, but I got no wifi to download rfkill to open my wifi so I can download rfkilll catch 22. I had that issue before with them, and Debian, and concluded and commented to them on it, to have rfkill included in the base install as they by default where using rfkill to kill connections getting out. even the ones at Bunsenlabs which I was helping with in their transition from crunchbang and left to due professional and personal reasons, strangly I was wondering about that distro just 2 days ago. :rolleyes: I see they are still around.

Anyways, if you are having issues with wifi and have a means to get something else, me personally, I'd look for something that does not have the same issues, something that works on install with your wifi card, or has the necessary tools included with base install to allow you to trouble shoot your system if need be.

Another possibility is to try Mint, which is very good on providing firmware. I once had a laptop with a Broadcom card and it needed a bit of firmware called (I think) b47. Once I had that file, I could use it alongside any distro.

Once you have the firmware

Mint is very Windows XP-like in appearance (it has a program menu).
Although it is based on Ubuntu, it has a much less confused appearance.

Hi everyone,

I couldn't fix the 18.04 and I needed to get this thing running again. I was totally lost with 18.04.

I just spent the day re-installing 16.04. It works better than it has in a long time.

I know where i'm at again. Thanks for the tips.

The time would have been better spent testing out a live version of a different distro.

You won't be getting any security fixes for your 16.04 beyond approx 6 months.
Each LTS release has about 3 years life (AFAIK).
Old releases tend to have old packages with them.

If a distro goes off-track for you, then consider checking out one that does what you want.
Mint is popular. ;)

Ubuntu LTS versions have a life of 5 years, so 16.04 will be supported until April 2021.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

Most, if not all, of the desktop variants, e.g. Xubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, etc. only support their added components for 3 years, but the underlying Ubuntu base is still supported for 5 years.

That's why I bailed out on Windows. Every few years it was something new and everything became obsolete. I made it to Vista and hated it, my wife made it to Win 7 which was worse, and I refused to go with Win 8 or 10! They make NO sense to me. I think they plan things that way.

That's when a guy in IN told me about Linux. He set me up with Ubuntu 16.04 and I got along OK with it. I had no idea about distros or anything about Linux. I'm not a techy guy, so I had to trust him. He told me that it would be the same for many years to come. It's been a huge learning curve.

Computers are the one thing in life that I don't care about fixing. I just want to turn the key and if it starts, good! I don't like messing with them. I just want it to be the same as when I shut it off!. I know that's pretty narrow, but that's how I see it. There are more important things to do in life.

Thanks for the tip about MINT. I'll look into it (when the time comes).

yeah mint isn't bad I actually like it except that removed google search, and i never looked into how to fit it other than installing firefox binary, and even then google search was removed.

It's easy to fix the Google thing in a browser.

Change your home page to Google - I've got mine set to https://duckduckgo.com/ as part of an attempt to reduce Googles tracking activities.