First off, you should make sure your hardware supports the 6 GHz band from WiFi 6E or WiFi 7. I have a Razer Blade 16 2023, which has an Intel AX211 chip that supports WiFi 6E. You can check if your chip supports WiFi 6E or WiFi 7. Secondly, you should make sure your country allows the 6 GHz band. I am in Taiwan where the 6 GHz band was approved by law in August 2023.
After installing Bazzite, you should be able to see and connect to any 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz band WiFi normally from the bottom right WiFi panel. But you won’t see the 6 GHz band here. This is because Linux decides what frequencies are legal to scan/connect on based on the regulatory domain(regdom). By default, my chip sets the regdom to 00, which is the most restrictive “world” regdom (essentially “safe everywhere”).
We can change this by setting it in a file. This uses the two-letter ISO country code (US, JP, KR, etc). For my case, Taiwan is TW.
echo "COUNTRY=TW" | sudo tee /etc/sysconfig/regdomain
And then reboot. After the reboot you should be able to see the 6 GHz band WiFi in the bottom right panel now. But not so fast, because you won’t be able to connect to it via that panel. If you try, you’ll be stuck on authenticating and then get timed out.
The default Linux WiFi backend, wpa_supplicant, currently struggles to connect to 6 GHz networks. The fastest fix is to switch to another Intel WiFi backend, iwd.
iwd already comes pre-installed with the latest Bazzite. So we don’t need to install it. But just in case yours didn’t come with it. You can install it manually.
rpm-ostree install iwd
Now we have to configure NetworkManager, the program that handles all things network, to use iwd instead of wpa_supplicant as its WiFi backend.
sudo tee /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/wifi_backend.conf > /dev/null <<'EOF'
[device]
wifi.backend=iwd
EOF
We also need to disable wpa_supplicant to avoid conflict.
sudo systemctl disable --now wpa_supplicant
And then finally we restart NetworkManager.
sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager
Now you can connect to the 6 GHz band networks with:
nmcli device wifi connect "YOUR-SSID" password "YOUR-PASSWORD"
Important caveat: because the default GUI panel on the bottom right is designed to work with wpa_supplicant, changing its backend has a side effect that you cannot connect to new WiFi networks with the GUI. Every time you want to connect to a new WiFi network, you have to use nmcli and do it in the command line. This only applies to the first connection. Once a network is remembered, you can use the GUI to connect to it again.
I believe they will improve wpa_supplicant and one day this tweak will no longer be needed but I don’t know when this will happen.