wifi not working - network unclaimed

Question

I replaced windows 10 with ubuntu 16.04 (from a live USB) on a new laptop right away. but both ethernet and wifi were not working (the entire "enable wifi" option was not there, and of course, no wifi networks were displayed). After a day of research and finding no solutions, i did a clean install but the problem persisted, then i did a clean install of ubuntu 17.10, and again, the problem remained for wifi, at which point i continued attempting to find a solution for another day and half to no avail. (however, i did just try ethernet again, it's now working. I fear that it may have been working all along and the wire i tested with the first time was not working. I'm about to clean install Ubuntu 16.04 again to figure out whether ethernet was actually not working there or if i was using a bad wire)

The following is the result of running "sudo lshw -C network"

*-network
   description: Ethernet interface
   product: RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller
   vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
   physical id: 0
   bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0
   logical name: eno1
   version: 15
   serial: ac:e2:d3:d2:31:da
   size: 10Mbit/s
   capacity: 1Gbit/s
   width: 64 bits
   clock: 33MHz
   capabilities: pm msi pciexpress msix vpd bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt 1000bt-fd autonegotiation
   configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=r8169 driverversion=2.3LK-NAPI duplex=full firmware=rtl8168h-2_0.0.2 02/26/15 latency=0 link=no multicast=yes port=MII speed=10Mbit/s
   resources: irq:127 ioport:4000(size=256) memory:a2104000-a2104fff memory:a2100000-a1203fff

*-network UNCLAIMED     
   description: Network controller
   product: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
   vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
   physical id: 0
   bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0
   version: 00
   width: 64 bits
   clock: 33MHz
   capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list
   configuration: latency=0
   resources: ioport:3000(size=256) memory:a2000000-a200ffff

and the following is the relevant part of the "lsusb" command result:

Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0bda:b009 Realtek Semiconductor Corp.

and the "lspci" command result (relevant part):

02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor CO., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 15)
03:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor CO., Ltd. Device d723 

note that all the results above have been exactly the same whether i was using ubuntu 16.04 or 17.10.

While i found many similar problems while researching, this solved question answered by the user chili555 seems to be the exact same question as mine but with a different device, adapter, drivers and firmwares. I think that the same solution he gave there should work for me if the driver's and firmware's names were adjusted to fit my case. but I haven't been able to find out how to identify which drivers are incorrectly installed in my case, and which drivers and firmwares i should load and install. also, now that I found out that ethernet is indeed working for me, I'm not sure if the problem in that question is the same as mine or not.

I'll update question when I test ethernet on ubuntu 16.04 again

update: now running ubuntu 16.04. ethernet is indeed working.

As for the duplicate claim. my question differs from this question which was marked as a duplicate of this question in that they are both simply asking for the drivers (and quite generally, without providing details about their hardware or the problems they're having). In the last part of my question, i did talk specifically about the drivers and firmware because that's what my research yielded as the most probable solution. ie, even if the solution to my network UNCLAIMED problem is installing and loading the drivers that were asked for in these two questions, my question is still different as I'm asking about a specific problem (network UNCLAIMED).

I installed the driver (https://github.com/jeremyb31/rtl8723de.git) and built it successfully, then ran sudo reboot, but the problem persists. network still unclaimed, "enable wifi" still not showing and no wifi networks are displayed. and I'm certain it was built successfully because when i attempted to do it again, the result was "module already built for "