My previous report was not correct. I was typing the wifi secret in the wrong place in the Gnome instance. Both KDE and Gnome work with rtl2800usb. My device does not have a 5G radio, thus I cannot check that part, but a 2.4G connection works. I also checked both instances with an RTL8188EU device and found it works as well. In short, I cannot duplicate the OP's result.