Lenovo IDEAPAD Won't connect to internet

[kalpana]

Folks, I am officially losing my mind. I have a new Lenovo IDEAPAD 3 and it REFUSES to connect to the internet. Wired--wireless--nothing works. It is currently running Kubuntu 22.04. It has a 8x12th GEn Intel Core i3-1215U and 7.5 GiB of ram. I'm also having to type this out by hand, so it is bound to have typos, and for that you have my apologies in advance.

The wireless adapter is completely pooched. I have tried multiple different things and I'm getting nowhere. The laptop does not have a network plug, all it has is a USB-C plug. My router has a USB port on it (USB-A) , but when I plug my USB-A to USB-C cable into the laptop nothing happens. There is no change. It does not detect the cable.

(Not that I think this matters a huge amount, but I originally installed Linux Mint on the machine, and the same problem occurred. I *assumed* it was the operating system and not the machine, so I uninstalled Mint and installed Kubuntu, only to have the same error. I have been working at this for over four hours now and I'm losing my mind. Hopefully you guys can help me out. I DO have D-LINK DWA-171 AC600 USB wireless adapter that I have tried inserting to get the laptop to default to that adapter, but it does not appear to be working either--either that or I can't make the machine swap adapters.)

The network controller is listed as "Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device b852"
Subsystem: Lenovo Device 4853
Flags: fast devsel, IRQ 225
I/O Ports at 3000 [disabled] [size=256]
Memory at 50500000 (64 bit, non-prefetchable) [disabled] [size=1M]
Capabilities: <access denied>

My lshw -C network result gives me the following
*-network UNCLAIMED
description: Network controller
product: Realtek Semiconductor
vendor: Realtek Semiconductor
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0
version: 00
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress cap_list
cofiguration: latency=0
resources: ioport:3000(size=256) memory:50500000-505fffff

my lspci gives this
02:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor, Device b852

ip link says this:
1: lo: <LOOPBACK, UP, LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group qlen 1000
link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00

my nmcli device show says this
GENERAL DEVICE: lo
GENERAL TYPE: loopback
GENERAL HWADDR: 00:00:00:00:00:00:00
GENERAL MTU: 65536
GENERAL STATE: 10 (unmanaged)
GENERAL CONNECTION: --
GENERAL CON-PATH: --
ip4 ADDRESS[1] 127.0.0.1/8
IP4 GATEWAY --
IP6 Address[1] ::1/128
IP6 GATEWAY --
IP6 ROUTE dst = ::1/128, nh = ::, mt = 256

ifconfig:
lo: flags=73<UP, LOOPBACK, RUNNING> mtu 65536
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 255.0.0.0
inet6: ::1 prefixlen 128 scopeid 0x10,host.
loop txqueuelen 1000 (local loopback)
RX packets 45500 bytes 3239782 (3.2 MB)
RX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 45500 bytes 3239782 (3.2 MB)
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0

iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions

Any help would be welcome!