Old realtek usb wifi adapter. doesnt work with Kde. works manually

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So first off - wifi works perfectly when setting it up manually with wpa_supplicant and ip addr add etc.
Second - i was googling all day and trying everything so please no ‘check rfkill’ etc.
about rfkill - it shows one of the wlan interfaces being hard blocked. BUT. it still works with wpa_supplicant so it doesnt seem to be the case.

Now what I think might be the issue - I have a Realtek rtl8192cu adapter. BUT i also have a built-in internet chip in this laptop which is just broken and i dont need it. but my system can still see it and apparently plasma wifi applet is trying to use it instead of my wifi adapter (ive seen some plasma errors about interface being broken where the interface was the broken chip).
but plasma doesnt give me any errors (i only got one when accidentally pressed hot-stop), i just cant turn on my wifi. i literally press the wifi toggle and nothing happens. naturally, when scanning with iw scan (or smth) it scans perfectly.

NetworkManager. nmcli d and nmcli device status show wifi being “unavailable”. and everything else being unavailable except “lo”
which, according to nmcli, is up and running.
also each time i restart NM i get a plasma notification “connection ‘lo’ connected (smth like that)”
inxi -N shows rtl8192cu driver being in use, even when i tried installing 8192cu-dkms driver. (the first one is preinstalled).

Right now the system is completely fresh-install. only preinstalled rtl8192cu driver is installed. *-dkms isnt installed.

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If you know what driver it uses, then you can blacklist it.

The only difference is in the -dkms suffix. A DKMS driver is automatically recompiled at boot time (if necessary) to match the version of the kernel that was booted.

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Either it work or it does not.

I am thinking that your Plasma desktop has a stored profile for the dysfunctional device.

Delete the profile and create a new pointing to the correct device.

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Oh, golly gosh, it worked. I literally blacklisted every other adapter and the very second I ran modprobe rtl8192cu Plasma turned WiFi on immediately; I didnt even have to restart anything.

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