Lenovo Yoga wifi adapter not working on Ubuntu

I recently bought a Lenovo Yoga 7 and installed Ubuntu on it. To my great frustration, the Wi-Fi didn’t work out of the box, and finding a working solution took way longer than it should have.

I’m writing this guide because I’ll inevitably end up in the same situation again someday and waste a few hours fixing it all over again without notes. So if you have a Lenovo Yoga 7 and have installed Ubuntu (or another Linux distro), this is how you fix the Wi-Fi issue.

How to fix the issue

The solution is to install the rtw89pci driver manually. This driver supports the Realtek Wi-Fi chipset used in the Lenovo Yoga 7, but it isn’t included in the default Ubuntu installation.

Follow these steps in your terminal:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install make gcc linux-headers-$(uname -r) build-essential git

git clone git://github.com/lwfinger/rtw89.git
cd rtw89
make
sudo make install

sudo modprobe rtw89pci

Once the module is loaded, Wi-Fi should start working immediately. If it doesn’t, a reboot usually does the trick.

That’s it — no BIOS changes, no kernel downgrades, just a working Wi-Fi connection. Hopefully this saves you the same frustration I went through.