Same problem, but I did not understand the above very much & figure I'd need some help picking which commands to use.
What i DO know is I messed around and disabled wi-fi when i left the NEW hp machine dual-boot Serena MATE 18.1 / win(ce)10 unattended. Everything was relatively fine before that. I've been learning about rfkill and how it shows the names of some things that are blocked or not; my 0: acer-wireless: wireless LAN is soft blocked, not hard blocked. Whereas there is no blockage at all 1: hci0: Bluetooth or 2:phy0: Wireless LAN.
The Network Connections taskbar icon has the top 4 greyed out options Ethernet Network/disconnected/Wi-Fi Networks/Wi-Fi is disabled. And i seem to recall "Wi-Fi is disabled" is where an ill-fated active "Disable Wi-Fi" option once was. I'm pretty sure if it was working before, i shouldn't need to load some driver i didn't have before, is that right? Soft blocked seems to me that i should not have touched that disable wi-fi button because now; even though i have active Enable Networking & Enable Wi-Fi both selected, it just doesn't. I can ping 127.0.0.1 and that is it.
I completely reinstalled Serena because i did foolishly think that i might play a computer game or two, but they aren't for me. No change with live SDCard mode or after install.
It looks like if I could just get that wi-fi button to work, I could then deal with loading my java class program, figuring out what to do with the dual boot that requires action to invoke and that mysterious not shutting off shut down feature.
Since it is a new laptop, i figured the fn key combo that controls airplane mode would fix it. But nothing i could think to try changed the Network Connections icon in the taskbar, or enabled WiFi.
My live 16GB SD card was generated from Linux Live USB Creator downloaded from a Mac, onto a USB drive. Transferred to new win10 machine to create mint SD card to reboot onto, SAID machine.
What can be done to enable wi-fi? It was working, and i loaded updates and tried some games, disabled wi-fi, and wi-fi never came back. Even after a complete reinstall.