CT42 So, kinda just saying screw it, and grabbing a dual band version of my built in NIC, not 100% sure it'll work ... but I guess I'll try that and see how it goes.
That sounds like a good solution, if it works. I hope it does.
My adventures yesterday reminded me what a pain it was to install the Cudy, even when the installation works. Your adventures convinced me that trying to work with wifi drivers not already in the kernel is more trouble than it's worth, at least to me.
I decided I'm going to stop beating my head against the wall and just stick with the Panda PAU06 300Mbps that I normally use. Its N rather than A/C, and not dual band, but it works good enough for a test machine. The Panda is plug and play with the kernel.
By the way, just to see what might happen, I tried the Cudy with a Ubuntu 20.10 live session on the test machine, with the Panda removed. Ubuntu didn't recognize the Cudy. I was wondering if it might (some distros have additional drivers over and above the native kernel drivers), but no luck. Pfffft.
I'm going to give the Cudy to a friend who is now using a TP-Link N-150 I gave him a couple years ago. The Cudy is plug and play with Windows, he'll get dual band, and I won't have to deal with trying to install Linux drivers for it any more.
Let us know what happens with the dual band version of your built-in NIC, and thanks for documenting all of this.