I'm currently using rtl8192cu wireless firmware from the non-free package "firmware-realtek_20161130-4_all.deb" and I'm having an unusual bandwidth (speed benchmarks giving me a 250kbps download speed and a 5mps upload speed while a Windows installation on the same machine gets 25mps downloads). I also tried the newer "firmware-realtek_20180825+dfsg-1~bpo9+1_all.deb" but download speeds were even slower.
I read here (https://askubuntu.com/questions/936987/ ... in-windows) that falling back to rtl8xxxu can help with this problem and I believe I'd be better off with that as I didn't provide the proprietary firmware for the net install of Debian and the download speed was normal at that time.
I can't find the generic firmware listed in the output of 'lsmod | grep rtl' and I lose all internet connections if I blacklist the proprietary ones. The only place where I can find a download for rtl8xxxu are the linux github (https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/ ... k/rtl8xxxu) and a fork that includes an hard-coded reference to firmware for a different device (https://github.com/johnheenan/rtl8xxxu).
What is the correct way to obtain, install and load generic firmware from the main Linux repository? Am I supposed to just download and build the c files from the official repository?