On Wed, 2025-12-24 at 15:02 -0500, Jeffrey Walton wrote: > > I recommend you disable Bluetooth and Wifi from the BIOS or UEFI. > You can usually power down the radios that way. > > Other methods, like disabling drivers and masking services, do not > necessarily power down the radios. They effectively disable > communications with the chips, but the chips are still powered on and > possibly working.
You said the magic word: Radios. I just saw that a few days ago while moving to a newer used WIFI router. Via `nmtui` (NetworkManager TUI) as a non-root user in a terminal window, "Radio" appears in the first [operations] list that pops up. When Radio is selected via arrow ups and downs plus Enter, a new screen says, "Set the radio switches status." Mine currently shows Wi-Fi and WWAN. For those, I see: Wi-Fi Hardware: Enabled Software: <Enabled> WWAN Hardware: Missing Software: <Enabled> The same arrow ups and downs plus Enter immediately change those ending "Enabled" values to Disabled. Changing the Wi-Fi entry kicked me offline as fast as I could test drive it just now. One thought is to wonder if doing the same as root might block regular users from changing the setting back unless they have admin permissions. Sometimes that makes a difference, sometimes not. I can imagine admins needing to block users from accessing e.g. the World Wide Web without those users being able to bypass being blocked. Reading that mention of BIOS one last time triggered the thought that nmtui changes may be on the less hard set (less stable/reliable) level of whatever package can alter the hardware clock via terminal these days. It might need to be labeled as an in-the-moment quick fix option. Hope this helps someone.. Cindy :) -- Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA * runs with birdseed! *
