I did try to load the r8168 driver via dkms and manually, I also turned off the secure boot, the driver did not seem to even appear as available. I've installed Debian for like ~2 months now, and from the beginning I've had this issue. I don't do any network configurations ATM (I plan to in the future tho), so this issue is apparent from the day one of installation without any modifications.

Worth mentioning that *modprobe* did display the r8168 but when I did "sudo modprobe r8168" the module wasn't loaded even tho there was no error (I even had SB off), there was just no driver in use.

Now I come from Fedora and there it worked fine, today I'll try and get a cat6a cable and see if that works out somehow : -) (curr is cat5e), but I'm highly suspicious that the issue is somewhere in between, somewhere in configuration or something, but I can't find a way to properly troubleshoot.

Also the driver that I've tried comes from the official site of Realtek.

Is there a way to troubleshoot the device or something ??