One issue frequently encountered of late by Ubuntu users, has been slow or flaky and intermittent WiFi performance. I’ve encountered it on every system I’ve put Ubuntu Desktop on since version 22, and on some servers as well. Some Ubuntu derivatives, such as Linux Mint, may expose  a setting to control power management for your WiFi adapter. Ubuntu Desktop does not. But there are settings for it, if you’re up for some CLI work. You’ll need admin (sudo) privileges and a terminal window for this. Here we go.

First, check your current power save state with this command, from the terminal:

cat /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/*.conf

Unless it has been previously changed, it will probably read:

[connection]
wifi.powersave = 3

In this context, 3 indicates that the Network Manager will use power management of the adapter, to save power – but it powers down the adapter at really, really bad times! So, let’s change that value to 2, indicating that the system will not use power saving. From the terminal:

sudo sed -i 's/3/2/' /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/*
sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager.service