When I was installing Linux Mint 19.3 Cinnamon 4.4.8, I run in to problems activating the WiFi adapter (Altheros AR5B97). My computer is a Acer Aspire 4752G with a i5 Intel cpu.
This WiFi adapter is some how blocked, the drivers are correctly installed from start, but to activate it one need to:
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
And edit in: blacklist acer_wmi
First then the WiFi adapter start working and I was able to get connected 
Hope my first Linux story was of interest