I recently spent a full day trying to debug wifi on my dual-boot desktop with "newish" hardware. The wifi would occasionally drop 100% of packets, for between 5 seconds and 10 minutes, and then go back to normal. I tried installing different drivers and following some askubuntu forum posts, but nothing seemed to work.
I'm not an expert on hardware stuff so I haven't got the knowledge to dig deep and find what caused it. But on Windows this stuff "just works". My impression is that Windows has "solved" wifi.
In the end I just bit the bullet and connected the ethernet cable...