In my case I'm renting and where the Internet comes in is in the other room. I got a good router and WiFi card though (the first WiFi card I bought was highly rated garbage though. Would drop off 5g whenever downloading something for awhile, like through steam)
Powerline adapters use the ac electrical outlets to run Ethernet. It's not as good or cheap as just Ethernet cables but it's usually better than wifi.
In my experience those can be a bit finicky depending on the outlet. My connection has been good on WiFi so far. Even on fps games like apex I do just as good as I do on Ethernet (not great)
Actually imo for most people it's not gonna be better than WiFi.
There's a fairly high chance of having issues depending on your electrical wiring and choice of outlets.
Additionally the latency is not amazing and while you may get higher raw bandwidth (if your WiFi is old and you signal is garbage) for a lot of users latency has more of an effect on the quality of their experience and if it's not any better than their WiFi was they aren't likely to be all that impressed.
I would either upgrade the WiFi instead or suck it up and run some Ethernet.
The cables can often be easily tucked under the moulding between the wall and floor, especially if you have carpet. Ethernet is low voltage so you do not really need an electrician to wire it for you.
Worst case find a way to shove it through the walls or behind some moulding, it's not a fire risk at that wattage so go nuts. No matter how annoying the effort, in the end you will be much happier for much longer than any other solution.
Same, I just bought a 20m Ethernet cable and some stick-on cable guides and it runs on the ceiling and through doorways. Not visible and no drilling.
I do it because:
I don't have a long enough Ethernet cable.
I don't do anything that really requires Ethernet connection speeds (besides large downloads on occasion)
Stability, speed and latency are always going to be better on similar generation wired connections and it isn’t remotely close.
Using a 5GHz network with little to no overlap for my tablet/steam deck. No issue streaming with moonlight at low latency without jitter.
My desktop and wifi are both the image on the right. When I first bought my desktop a couple years back, it had only around 4 gigs of ram. I also live in an apartment, so Internet is only occasionally okay a specific times.
Get a hard wired connection. If you can't, get a router to act as a wireless client.
That's how I have my home lab set up until I can install a networking rack in my hall closet and drop some ethernet. Just bought two cheap netgear routers and set them to bridge mode.
You also could install openWRT. OpenWRT is great as its Linux and has a web interface that exposes every networking feature you can think of.
I'm using MikroTik hardware for everything else. I just needed a high speed connection from my office to the living room.
Nowadays every router have additional ethernet slots so just make wired connections with router to stationary devices like console, tv, pc
