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Comment by chrisper | Hacker News Reader

I feel the same way about network manager. Maybe it's just me, but I am not a huge fan of nmcli.

You can just uninstall it and use something else to configure networking. It's one of the first things I purge on any distro.

With systemd it's not so simple.

What do you replace it with?

All of my debian systems have their network configured with /etc/network/interfaces like so:

    iface wlan0 inet dhcp
        wpa-ssid redacted
        wpa-psk "redacted"

It's a bit clunky if I need to take a laptop around to different wifi networks, but I don't do that very much.

I use wpa_supplicant on Debian, it has no problem associating with many different wpa-psk networks. I think it can also do wpa-enterprise, but haven't needed that yet.

Personally, I replace it with connman[0], as I find connmanctl(1) to be far more usable than nmcli.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Connman

systemd-networkd

It actually works rather well but it doesn't have every feature that NetworkManager does.

I use netctl and find it works very well.

For non-wifi use cases you probably don't need anything at all (maybe dhcdcd).

I use wpa_supplicant + dhcpcd + wpa_gui and only have to update my config like once per year.

networkmanager is a shocking mess, when you look at how simple this functionality is in the *BSDs.

by "this functionality" do you mean things like

* connecting to different wireless networks that use wpa enterprise authentication (which I think some of the bsds only recently added support for)

* bringing up usb networking interfaces via cell phone tethering on demand

* managing multiple different vpn clients and profiles from a single interface

Or do you mean things like

* Bringing up a networking interface with a static ip address

Because I use network manager for the former on laptops, and remove it on servers that only need the latter.

The former.

As with many things, yes, it took OpenBSD and FreeBSD longer to get that functionality. The tradeoff is that they delivered a well thought out, consistent, and well-engineered solution, rather than a poorly thought out mess of CADT-driven bloat.

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