Network Manager Can't Interact With Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174 despite WICD working and native kernel support

[Justin]

This fails in a similar manner from 16.04 to 18.04, in both gnome and unity where applicable. Details of failure in 18.04:

System always boots in airplane mode, no matter what. When you disable it and go to turn the wifi on in system settings, it hangs while doing so, but sometimes works and shows wifi, though it usually doesn't. I can't reproduce the cause of success of failure, but the wifi settings menu does immediately stop updating new networks after this point no matter what. The wifi menu in the top right never works at all.

How I know it's not a hardware issue:
It works in windows
It works in WICD
People say it works in other distros
It shows up under lshw -C network as expected

How I know it's not a firmware issue:
It works in other distros
It works in WICD

How I know it's not a driver issue:
It's natively supported in the kernel after an open source driver that worked for everyone was merged (which no one could get properly with Ubuntu's network manager)
It shows up under lshw -C network as expected
It works with WICD

This is the default wifi card for a ton of new Lenovo laptops, so this is actually a serious issue.

[Justin (justinkterry)]

Marked as confirmed based on several other reports on the internet:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/929027/qualcomm-atheros-qca6174-802-11ac-wireless-network-adapter-168c003e-rev-32

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2323812

etc

Fun update:
Bluetooth from the same card works perfectly fine once airplane mode is disabled.