Well, I figured out a workaround for this issue. I will quickly summarize an recap so as to keep this all together.
Initial problem 1: I had concerns that a wireless usb wifi adaptor device would never activate or show in any version of linux. In other distros, finding and installing these drivers is tricky, but in Linux Lite, the 3rd party driver manager that this distro comes with seemed to work some magic on its own. Using that got the device working quickly.
Solution 1: Scan and install drivers from the driver manager lite comes with.
Initial Problem 2: The concerns of the entire post here turned into an issue keeping my iphone based wireless hotspot connected to the network. I had confirmed in advance that this was an existing issue on most if not all distributions of linux, even though the phone itself appeared to be the center of the issue, despite being functional. Wifi hotspot would be found and working, but auto-drop after five minutes and rendered unable to reconnect without a full linux reboot. I had a linux mint with the exact same issue.
Solution 2: I was happy to find that despite lacking any understanding as to why, disabling the IPV6 trafiic mode for the specific hotspot connection has solved the problem, permenantly so. Doing this initially did not work when I performed it in mint, and the results were wonky as I changed and reverted lots of network settings specific to that connection. In both the case with mint and lite, disabling or ignoring the IPV6 protocol prevented the device from disconnecting (all other settings were as default values). I am currently logged in from that hotspot and it has been over an hour with no drop, tested more than once. I know that was not the initial concern of the post, but now this could be a solution if anyone like me is struggling with a random network drop on hotspot connections. What's going on under the code is anybody's guess. The network speed is pretty fast too, despite the bottlenecks of the physical hardware.
Initial problem 1: I had concerns that a wireless usb wifi adaptor device would never activate or show in any version of linux. In other distros, finding and installing these drivers is tricky, but in Linux Lite, the 3rd party driver manager that this distro comes with seemed to work some magic on its own. Using that got the device working quickly.
Solution 1: Scan and install drivers from the driver manager lite comes with.
Initial Problem 2: The concerns of the entire post here turned into an issue keeping my iphone based wireless hotspot connected to the network. I had confirmed in advance that this was an existing issue on most if not all distributions of linux, even though the phone itself appeared to be the center of the issue, despite being functional. Wifi hotspot would be found and working, but auto-drop after five minutes and rendered unable to reconnect without a full linux reboot. I had a linux mint with the exact same issue.
Solution 2: I was happy to find that despite lacking any understanding as to why, disabling the IPV6 trafiic mode for the specific hotspot connection has solved the problem, permenantly so. Doing this initially did not work when I performed it in mint, and the results were wonky as I changed and reverted lots of network settings specific to that connection. In both the case with mint and lite, disabling or ignoring the IPV6 protocol prevented the device from disconnecting (all other settings were as default values). I am currently logged in from that hotspot and it has been over an hour with no drop, tested more than once. I know that was not the initial concern of the post, but now this could be a solution if anyone like me is struggling with a random network drop on hotspot connections. What's going on under the code is anybody's guess. The network speed is pretty fast too, despite the bottlenecks of the physical hardware.