I have an oldish Dell Latitude 7480 which doesn’t meet the requirements for upgrade to Windows 11 so I thought I’d take the opportunity to install Linux on it as I only really need it for day to day web stuff / studying / media and light gaming.

My first choice was Linux Mint but, for some reason it would not recognise that the laptop had a wifi card. So I tried Manjaro but felt Arch wasn’t for me so opted for Pop_OS and whilst everything I want works I thought I’d use the time to distro hop live environments to see what else was out there.

I know live envs doesn’t give you the full picture but to be honest I was more interested in the aesthetic appeal of the DE.

Where my curiosity lies is this, from my understanding Linux Mint is based on underlying Ubuntu as is Pop_OS, so how come both Pop_OS and Ubuntu recognise the wi-fi card out of the box so to speak but Mint doesn’t.

This is the wifi card in question:

   description: Wireless interface
   product: Wireless 8265 / 8275
   vendor: Intel Corporation
   physical id: 0
   bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0
   logical name: wlp2s0
   version: 78
   serial: cc:2f:71:ec:52:b1
   width: 64 bits
   clock: 33MHz
   capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless
   configuration: broadcast=yes driver=iwlwifi driverversion=6.6.6-76060606-generic firmware=36.ca7b901d.0 8265-36.ucode ip=192.168.1.6 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11
   resources: irq:131 memory:ec000000-ec001fff

And with this in mind, does anyone have any idea how to get this wi-fi card working with Mint, I’m assuming I need a drive which the other drivers have but Mint, for whatever reason, doesn’t have.