3 ms·

I see this mentioned a lot but what actually is the problem with NetworkManager that people complain about?

yellowapple 11y ago
It's a buggy pile of shit, for starters. Constantly drops network connections, will frequently flood your network history with multiple duplicate entries for no apparent reason, will often mysteriously fail to connect to a wireless network for whatever reason even though others work fine (and other devices can connect to the wireless network in question without issue - even other NetworkManager-using ones)... that sort of thing. I know the underlying utilities (namely, wpa_supplicant) aren't the issue, since wpa_supplicant - in my experience - is much more robust when configured manually, with far fewer problems, but at the expense of having to edit wpa_supplicant.conf in order to manage wireless networks, which is a bit of a pain (though perhaps worth not having to deal with NetworkManager). If someone figures out a way to port Android's network management system (I'm not sure exactly what it is off the top of my head, but I know it uses wpa_supplicant and that it's not NetworkManager) to general-purpose GNU/Linux distros, that would be a godsend.
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  OK I must be really lucky. I find NetworkManager just works. It does ask for my admin password when it doesn't need it but I find that if I just ignore that prompt then everything is fine.
  - yellowapple 11y ago
    Odd that it's asking for the admin password. The more common issue with passwords is that it incessantly prompts for the user's password or for the wireless network passphrase due to some strange inability to talk to whatever keyring daemon is in use (and thus an inability to retrieve network passwords). I usually work around that by disabling the keyring (either globally or simply preventing NetworkManager from using it).
    - JupiterMoon 11y ago
      I've always used a separate non-sudo account for my general computing even on my personal machines and just use the sudo account as an admin account. EDIT Also it doesn't actually need the password seeing as I never type it in and my wifi works fine (with multiple networks every day).
mindslight 11y ago
It tries to bite off a lot more than it can chew, and fails horribly for anything that isn't a simple wifi config. 1. Makes fixed wireless connections less reliable. I plugged an LTE modem into a server for a backup link, and network mangler set it as a default route and munged up resolv.conf. My mistake for not removing it when I installed the machine, but that's hardly an endorsement. 2. Makes complex config out of reach. On my laptop, I'd like wlan0/eth0 to be bridged by default so that I can easily switch existing connections to a wired connection by plugging in. But I'm not going to fight network mangler just to get this feature. 3. Furthermore lots of times I'll want to setup an ad-hoc config on the wired interface (say, configuring a new router). For which it's easier to kill -9 the mangler and setup manually, especially if I want to keep my Internet connection. 4. GUI is the preferred way to config/interact with it, which is completely un-unix. It's one of the few things I have to do manually when reinstalling a machine. I played with Arch a while back, and wicd felt much simpler and more straightforward. Network Mangler feels like a hack someone came up with to setup a simple wifi connection, which then got adopted into a bigger role than it can handle.

It's a buggy pile of shit, for starters. Constantly drops network connections, will frequently flood your network history with multiple duplicate entries for no apparent reason, will often mysteriously fail to connect to a wireless network for whatever reason even though others work fine (and other devices can connect to the wireless network in question without issue - even other NetworkManager-using ones)... that sort of thing. I know the underlying utilities (namely, wpa_supplicant) aren't the issue, since wpa_supplicant - in my experience - is much more robust when configured manually, with far fewer problems, but at the expense of having to edit wpa_supplicant.conf in order to manage wireless networks, which is a bit of a pain (though perhaps worth not having to deal with NetworkManager). If someone figures out a way to port Android's network management system (I'm not sure exactly what it is off the top of my head, but I know it uses wpa_supplicant and that it's not NetworkManager) to general-purpose GNU/Linux distros, that would be a godsend.

JupiterMoon 11y ago
OK I must be really lucky. I find NetworkManager just works. It does ask for my admin password when it doesn't need it but I find that if I just ignore that prompt then everything is fine.
- yellowapple 11y ago
  Odd that it's asking for the admin password. The more common issue with passwords is that it incessantly prompts for the user's password or for the wireless network passphrase due to some strange inability to talk to whatever keyring daemon is in use (and thus an inability to retrieve network passwords). I usually work around that by disabling the keyring (either globally or simply preventing NetworkManager from using it).
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    I've always used a separate non-sudo account for my general computing even on my personal machines and just use the sudo account as an admin account. EDIT Also it doesn't actually need the password seeing as I never type it in and my wifi works fine (with multiple networks every day).

mindslight 11y ago

It tries to bite off a lot more than it can chew, and fails horribly for anything that isn't a simple wifi config. 1. Makes fixed wireless connections less reliable. I plugged an LTE modem into a server for a backup link, and network mangler set it as a default route and munged up resolv.conf. My mistake for not removing it when I installed the machine, but that's hardly an endorsement. 2. Makes complex config out of reach. On my laptop, I'd like wlan0/eth0 to be bridged by default so that I can easily switch existing connections to a wired connection by plugging in. But I'm not going to fight network mangler just to get this feature. 3. Furthermore lots of times I'll want to setup an ad-hoc config on the wired interface (say, configuring a new router). For which it's easier to kill -9 the mangler and setup manually, especially if I want to keep my Internet connection. 4. GUI is the preferred way to config/interact with it, which is completely un-unix. It's one of the few things I have to do manually when reinstalling a machine. I played with Arch a while back, and wicd felt much simpler and more straightforward. Network Mangler feels like a hack someone came up with to setup a simple wifi connection, which then got adopted into a bigger role than it can handle.