Comment 1 for bug 1707185

Dave, Lwfinger is Larry Finger, the maintainer of the rtl8821ae driver already in Ubuntu 16.04. When you used his GitHub driver, you had undone a change by Realtek, and that's why it worked. The Realtek change was 40b368af4b75 ("rtlwifi: Fix alignment issues") and caused the connection loss.

Larry Finger and I have worked on the connection loss in the past few weeks. Linux kernel v4.14 when it is released should contain a fix b8b8b16352cd ("rtlwifi: rtl8821ae: Fix connection lost problem"). But there's nothing wrong with continuing with the GitHub driver if it is working fine for you.

Martin, package linux-firmware-1.168 and earlier versions have the rtl8821ae firmware for the wireless network adapter. So I don't think this bug should "affects" linux-firmware or linux-firmware-nonfree.