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by cromulen 3372 days ago
-FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

-HEADLINE: Network manager that works

-DESCRIPTION: The single thing that would make Ubuntu seem 10x more polished than it now is the horrible state of the network manager.

The little wifi bar in the top right. Sometimes, randomly, after dropping a wifi connection, or going to sleep and waking it will:

1) Stop listing SSIDs except the one I've already configured and want to connect to. (But I know there's more)

or

2) Show the "wired connection" icon. Gray out the entire wifi section of the network manager dropdown menu. All while it is actually connected to some wifi and I can use the internet.

These issues are mostly fixed by a `systemctl restart network-manager`, but sometimes require a full restart.

I'm the kind of person that recommends people to get Ubuntu. "Everything just works nowadays on Ubuntu". Then I get a call a week later and have to explain to them "just type sudo systemctl restart network-manager into terminal" They then give me the "What? That is so stupid."

ROLE/AFFILIATION: Student / Sysadmin / Machine (Deep) Learning Engineer / Memeber of a students' club that organizes an event on every Ubuntu release where we help fellow students dual boot Ubuntu (or another Linux distro, but we recommend Ubuntu)

EDIT: formatting.

7 comments

Agreed. There are new Network Manager bugs in just about every Ubuntu release.

At one point the NM task bar applet was simply gone.

Then it stopped managing wired connections breaking networking entirely for me.

Now the network no longer works after disconnecting from a VPN, which is an improvement compared to the previous situation where it often showed the VPN as active when it wasn't.

Good alternatives exist too, like the light and fast connman. I use it on a thinkpad running NixOS and it works beautifully.
A big +1 from me. Network Manager is so bad I wonder how it ever got adopted by the main distros.
And there's currently a big but where you can't get internet when you reconnect to a vpn after disconnecting. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+b...
Yes. Connman (developed by Intel) is a much more modular design. Network Manager evolved from a Gnome applet.
Add the fact that openvpn via Network manager has been broken for ~3-4 years as well.
Yes. Network Manager is horrible.
Seconded.
+1 This!