Search for your computer model on ifixit.com — they have take apart guides that show you which pieces are swappable/replaceable.

I wouldn’t bet on it. The Wi-Fi/Bluetooth module in there doesn’t seem to have a standard form factor so even if you can slot in a standard module you might not be able to connect the antenna wires. Also, this MBP came out just around the same time as M.2 so you’ll probably have to go for an older mPCIe module.

A USB adapter is the far safer bet.

Have you opened it up yet? I think that if it uses a standard connection then you can probably get it working with Gentoo without any issues, or any distro really. Just buy a card that you know the distro has drivers for. It will never work with Mac OS again though once you swap the hardware, unless you swap it back. It doesn’t sound like you care about that, so it’s a non issue.

Forewarning, Apple solders some components to the board. They’ve done that with RAM before. So, you may need decent desoldering skills to successfully swap it. Otherwise it should be pretty easy. Those mobile NIC are usually really easy to swap. Un-tape the wire that serves as an antenna, remove one small screw, and pop them out. Reverse it to reinstall.

The hardest part is probably going to be getting the case open, but I’m sure there are YouTube videos for that. Take a piece of paper and trace the MacBook. Then tape every screw you remove to the paper from the spot that you removed it from. For example, if you remove a screw from the top right corner, then tape the screw to the top right corner of the traced shape on the paper. You can also just skip tracing it and treat the outside edges of the paper as the outer edges of the case. Anyways, the taping method is how I used to keep track of where every screw goes when I was working on laptops.

Good luck, were all counting on you.

I haven’t worked on the exact model but some of the others are known to reject 3rd party wifi modules.

If it’s not a big bother I would probably just use a usb adapter.

There was a old method of using ndiswrapper to run unsupported wifi cards if you wanna investigate if that’s still a thing.

I just installed Pop!_OS on my Late-2011 and had to manually install broadcom drivers, maybe this will help.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/oebqwm/pop_os_cant_detect_macbook_pro_2011_wifi/

https://alexswensen.io/blog/2020-12-09_popos-on-2011-macbook-pro

I’m not sure if the first link’s steps were necessary to enable the second step or not. And of course this is for Pop, so the Gentoo equivalent for Pop Shop, but I imagine there’s generally driver compatibility between linux distros?

Try aliexpress. Most of the time they have an adapter so you can use a standard network card in a MacBook

Could you roll back to the previous kernel version that worked? I know you said you overwrote the config, but figuring out what it was seems like it’d be easier than having to replace the Wifi card

No, dont waste your time. Apple products are not repairable by end users.