My 2012 laptop is on Limited Connectivity for 10-15min…
…sometimes Network Manager will use 100% of a core of my i3 CPU when it begins.
Rebooting helps but it takes a long time on that old HDD.
Or just play the waiting game.
Happens on wired and wifi and around once or twice per day.
It started to happen after the Sept 18 update I think.
Driver is r6168 and I’m using the 6.1.55 kernel.
I also installed the proprietary driver and it is checked alongside the literally free one in the mhwd gui.
But sudo hwinfo --network says r6168 is running, but also lists ath9k maybe this is for wifi?
How do I use the propitiatory driver?
It says active=unknown for both
SysFS ID is class/net/enp19s
or … wlp7s0
The card is Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411
Would love to use 6169 if that helps
and get instructions how.
If it happens only once or twice, it may simply be your ISP dropping the connection temporarily; or resources might be low generally while streaming, which might also produce the same effect; especially on a laptop of that vintage.
However, these are only guesses.
It might be worth trying a slightly older kernel for a few days, to see if that makes a difference.
Thank you for your efforts, the 3 of you.
Although the Hardware Configuration in the KDE settings menu still (also after 3 reboots) shows 8168 installed (and not the proprietary driver checked en plus anymore), inxi -Nazy shows, hopefully correctly, r8169.
I did that and didn’t have to
[not “sudo.mv”] because that file was auto-deleted upon the uninstall of 6168 (the second command above). So I didn’t change anything there.
Now I will observe over next days if the problems persists and hopefully eventually mark the thread as solved. Cheers!
Ok, the problem persists. I always notice at the end of a Duolingo lessen (flatpak). Then the stream I was was watching would continue to run, the its data transferred was shown in the System Tray. Where the connection shows as Limited after a minute or two. Any other connections seems to be refused. If you reload any Firefox tab, including the one with the stream: fail.
I used to have that problem the whole time I was watching Acestream (older python, app was never updgraded), on my main PC.
Do you have any application that might automatically check for updates or some other resource (such as blocklists, for example); in the background whenever the system becomes idle?
There is potential here for causing limited connectivity if this (hypothetical) application temporarily maximizes (hogs) bandwidth to achieve its goal.
Yes… I’m using Portmaster. Just looked and it auto updates and downloads filter-list updates (it won’t say how often).
System Tray would however show that traffic? But worth to try shutting it down next time it happens, to rule it out/ see if the problem will go away by that.
It definitely has to do with Portmaster. It even geoblocks me sometimes. Must have to do DNS settings. Let me fondle the settings and a way of running it without the gui and then mark it as solved finally…
Being that it’s beta grade software, no doubt it still has a few wrinkles to iron out. You might also try disabling the blocklists for a time, in case legitimate traffic is sporadically blocked by over-zealous inclusions.
I haven’t found a solution, however a workaround that is opening the Portmaster gui and restarting it.
Issue occurs both when running the or gui, the gui/minimized, or just the system.d service.
– whatever that was meant to infer. I’m glad he finally discovered some communication skills. 
