Comment # 25 on bug 944978 from Larry Finger

I am not aware of any similar problems with rtl8821ae. The most recent crashes
were when the interface was in AP mode, and that was fixed in kernel 4.1.6.
There are no significant changes in the driver since that commit.

I downloaded the DVD version of Leap 42.1 Beta 1 and booted it with an
RTL8821AE installed. There was a delay of perhaps 30 sec before the warning
about the beta version appeared. but it was normal after that. As the Plasma5
code fails to restore Konsole instances on reboot, I find Leap 42.1 unusable.
For that reason I aborted the installation process at the proposed partitioning
screen and did not install it.

On the OP's system, the firmware was available and loaded. The "firmware not
ready to run" message is not significant. It appears on my current 13.2 system
running kernel 4.3.0-rc2, which works fine.