while fumbling to pause grub during boot, I think I managed to disable the wifi. its affecting distro kernel, and my own booting with iwlwifi.debug=0xff on command line shows me iwl_pcie_apm_init Init card's basic functions reporting RF_KILL (radio disabled) It is reading that from somewhere, but where ? F12 has radio-beacon icon, pressing it causes WM to show Airplane mode, so that appears to be the rfr-kill switch dmesg -w shows me bluetooth going on and off, but no try to do so on iwlwifi are there other rf-switches ? I also tried reboot, F2 - (uefi bios) reset factory, reboot that obviously didnt help FWIW this laptop exhibits pcie correctable errors, I have pci=noaer in my boot line to ignore it. too long ? iirc, it was on same pcie port removing it doesnt help now,