FIXED thanks all, installed Ubuntu which fixed it. Much obliged to all comments :-)

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I may give it up, but just playing with an old laptop and looking at linux for the first real time and of course, the old laptop happens to have this network adapter… 🤦🏻

(BCM4313 802.11bgn). From the rabbit hole it’s a typical case, laptop tethers to phone fine. Ethernet during Debian 12 install (kde plasma). Detects my wifi but won’t connect (deactivated message).

In theory it should have been as easy as:

HTTPS://wiki.debian.org/wl or https://wiki.debian.org/brcm80211

Has to be the stupidest thing…

configuration: broadcast = yes driver = brcmsmac driverversion = 6.1.0-13-amd64 firmware = 610.812 ip = 172.20.10.5 latency = 0 link = yes multicast = yes wireless = IEEE 802.11