I just installed kde on a new drive, dual boot with windows.
And now the wifi is nowhere to be seen. The iwlfifi driver is present in /lib/firmware. I replaced it just to be sure.
I restarted NetworkManager, nothing. lshw shows the card just fine, driver loaded iwlwifi.

Can someone with more experience please help me? This is so frustrating..

root@enfinders-KDE:/home/enfinders# lshw -C network
*-network
description: Network controller
product: Wi-Fi 6 AX210/AX211/AX411 160MHz
vendor: Intel Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
version: 1a
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress msix bus_master cap_list
configuration: driver=iwlwifi latency=0
resources: irq:72 memory:d0500000-d0503fff

root@enfinders-KDE:/home/enfinders# iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

enx5c857e3a32a2 no wireless extensions.

I'm posting the solution here in case anyone comes across the same problem. As i'm dual booting with windows 11, the fast startup option was enabled. I disabled it in Control pannel > power > Change what closing the lid does > modify settings. and wifi is now running just fine.