A somehow old (2021) but interesting article about why the community is moving from wpa-supplicant to iwd: https://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2021/243/iNet-Wireless-Daemon

Here is an excerpt of interest: "The description of the iwd project on www.kernel.org highlights simplicity as an important factor behind iwd's recent rise: "The core goal of the project is to optimize resource utilization: storage, runtime memory, and link-time costs. This is accomplished by not depending on any external libraries and utilizing features provided by the Linux Kernel to the maximum extent possible. The result is a self-contained environment that only depends on the Linux Kernel and the runtime C library.""

ArchLinux and Ubuntu respectively tested iwd on July 2020 and in Ubuntu 20.10.

If you have an android phone it's likely using wpa_supplicant.

iwd is great. In fact I'd say take it a step further and get rid of the beast that is NetworkManager as well.

https://austindw.com/networkmanager-is-bloat/

If you can, get yourself a wireless access point instead.

You can connect the computer by ethernet to the access point that then connects to the WiFi network.

By having the device separate you can have it situated away from the computer for better connection and the computer only sees a wired connection.

Plus they tend to be more stable than dongles.

Holy shit I think I have the same problem, mesh network and all. I assumed it was a driver issue; thanks for the pointer!

Thanks, I switched from unconfigured (but working because magic) networkmanager to pure wpa_supplicant on my NixOS system yesterday and I definitely noticed frequent reconnecting.