Why does GNOME on Raspberry Pi 4 Model B keep freezing when I launch my Wi‑Fi scanner for abandoned sites?

I feel like I've been chasing ghosts for the last week. Every time I fire up the latest GNOME 44 on my Pi 4 (8 GB, BCM2711), the whole desktop just locks up the moment the airodump‑ng script starts sniffing. The kernel logs are a parade of "mmc0: timeout" and "brcmfmac: firmware load failed" – classic Raspberry firmware nonsense that never seems to get fixed.

I tried the usual suspects: downgrade to kernel 5.15, switch to Xorg, even a bare‑bones i3 session. nothing. The Wi‑Fi dongle (Alfa AWUS036NHA, RTL8187) works fine on a laptop, but on the Pi it triggers a USB reset loop that makes the power LED flicker like a dying neon sign.

Maybe I'm just unlucky, but the community keeps pushing these half‑baked updates while we’re out there mapping abandoned factories. It feels like the distro maintainers think “cutting‑edge” means “break everything that actually works”. If anyone has a stable combo – maybe a Debian 11 + LXQt + kernel 5.10 with the rtl8187 driver patched – I'd appreciate a heads‑up. Otherwise, I might just go back to a cheap Android phone for the scans and leave the Pi to collect dust.

TL;DR: GNOME + Pi 4 + RTL8187 = constant freezes. Looking for a proven workaround or a sane recommendation.