3rd March 2017, 13:36
Hi linuxtim. I know this does not guarantee you anything, but FYI...
My Lappy used to run Mint 17.x KDE4 for a few years, & its WiFi performance/reliability was good. Late last year i upgraded it to Mint 18 Xfce, & its WiFi performance/reliability was terrible... constant dropouts, & constant complete breakages of its applet, requiring reboot. It was just horrible, & none of the ideas i found in the Mint fora solved it. At the end of last year in exasperation i replaced Mint Xfce with Maui 1... & Lappy's WiFi was once more simply excellent. That continued with 2 & 2.1.
My Lappy has not yet been upgraded to the HWE package [& i might not bother, since it's now a fairly old machine]. It uses kernel 4.4.0-64.
I hope it works out for you as nicely as it did for me.
My Lappy used to run Mint 17.x KDE4 for a few years, & its WiFi performance/reliability was good. Late last year i upgraded it to Mint 18 Xfce, & its WiFi performance/reliability was terrible... constant dropouts, & constant complete breakages of its applet, requiring reboot. It was just horrible, & none of the ideas i found in the Mint fora solved it. At the end of last year in exasperation i replaced Mint Xfce with Maui 1... & Lappy's WiFi was once more simply excellent. That continued with 2 & 2.1.
My Lappy has not yet been upgraded to the HWE package [& i might not bother, since it's now a fairly old machine]. It uses kernel 4.4.0-64.
I hope it works out for you as nicely as it did for me.