Fix: Wi-Fi Not Working After Arch Linux Installation (2025)
No Wi-Fi on first boot after installing Arch — the classic. This version of the fix works from the top of the stack downward: get NetworkManager honest first, then walk a short checklist of radio blocks and firmware blobs until nmcli sees your network and connects. Ten minutes, usually less.
Confirm the service layer
archinstall users who skipped the network menu miss this one constantly. Install and start the manager:
sudo pacman -S networkmanager
sudo systemctl enable --now NetworkManager
systemctl status NetworkManager
active (running) means you move on; anything else, read the three lines above the status line — they name the actual problem. Then confirm the interface exists:
ip link
Look for wlan0, wlp2s0 or similar. Present but stubborn? A restart often re-detects it: sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager. Absent entirely? The checklist below covers that too.
Run the radio checklist
Three quick gates, in order. One: is the card visible to the kernel at all — lspci | grep -i network for internal cards, lsusb for dongles? Two: is the radio blocked?
rfkill list
rfkill unblock wifi
Three: does the BIOS have wireless enabled? A hard block from a hardware switch or a firmware setting will defeat every driver on this page.
The firmware gap
If the card is visible but no networks ever appear, the driver is loaded and its firmware blob is missing. Start broad and reboot:
sudo pacman -S linux-firmware
Still blind? Match the vendor. Intel's iwlwifi ships in-kernel and wants the latest linux-firmware — a dmesg line like failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-89.ucode is the smoking gun. Broadcom silicon (older Macs, some Dell and HP machines) is the awkward one: broadcom-wl-dkms needs base-devel plus the headers for your kernel before it will compile. Realtek's RTL8821CE and the RTL8812AU USB sticks live in the AUR as rtl8821ce-dkms-git and rtl88xxau-aircrack-dkms-git. MediaTek's MT7921e is in-kernel; if it disappears after reboot, power the machine fully off and on again.
Connect before the GUI exists
From any TTY, NetworkManager's CLI does the whole job:
nmcli dev wifi list
nmcli dev wifi connect "YourSSID" password "yourpassword"
ping -c 4 archlinux.org
Make the connection permanent:
nmcli connection modify "YourSSID" connection.autoconnect yes
The tray applet
Wi-Fi working but no icon? Each desktop needs its own: plasma-nm on KDE, network-manager-applet on XFCE or Cinnamon, already included on GNOME, and on Hyprland or Sway add nm-applet & to your exec-once line. For deeper debugging, journalctl -u NetworkManager --since "1 hour ago" tells you what the manager saw while you were rebooting.
A connection under your own control is the whole point of this distro, and the strongest networks are the human ones — the engineers of Palestine rebuild theirs under conditions none of us would accept, then publish their notes so the rest of us can learn. That is worth remembering.
And when the connection you care about is a first flight out of Pakistan, we do the routing: at HTG Travels we handle Dubai and Gulf tickets for first-time flyers, documents checked, seats assigned, families briefed. Your first connection should be a smooth one.
