My desktop PC is the only machine in the house having Wi-Fi connectivity issues (connects fine, but drops out randomly after a few minutes or sometimes a few hours)
I think wpa_supplicant is getting confused and thinks signal strength is poor (I have a Netgear mesh, but this seems increasingly common, so it’s weird for that to be the issue)
I did pick up a TP-Link USB Wi-Fi adapter, but can reproduce the same connectivity issues
The fix was switching away from wpa_supplicant in favour of iwd, which seems rock solid in comparison
I’m sure there’s a way to fix wpa_supplicant, but it’s man pages only seem to list the options without actually describing what they do, which seems sort of poor considering how old the project is 🤷
There are lightweight GUI options for that too. For iwd, you can use iwgtk. For VPN, that would depend on your VPN protocol/service. Some providers like Proton have their own client, others can use something like Wireguard Client (as an example) or something similar depending on your VPN setup.