[willtim]

This isn't true. It was never as good as Intel's Connman, which was designed to be modular from the start. NetworkManager started out as a UI app and then was evolved into what it is now. It's still not as fast as connecting to WiFi as Connman. I guess it was adopted instead of Connman because RedHat.

[ahartmetz]

Maybe Intel was not cooperative about Connman. Trying to contribute a patch to Connman was the worst patch contribution experience I've ever had. On the official IRC channel, over several days and times of day, there were only people who could tell me about the developers, but the developers were not there. The bug tracker required writing an e-mail to someone at Intel to open an account. I don't remember details about the mailing list, but if I did write to it I was ignored as well. In the end the patch never went in, I had enough. And yes, the patch made sense. Years later I later saw one that seemed to fix my problem in a similar way.

Connman is better at least insofar that it is less code than NetworkManager and that it connects to a Wifi network in under a second instead of several seconds. But I believe it can also do less, for example regarding VPNs and such.

[vetinari]

NM doesn't connect to wifi by itself, it uses wpa supplicant for that. If something is slow, it is wpa supplicant. Fortunately, nm backends are modular and you can use Intel's iwd instead.

[bigbubba]

A while ago, maybe about a year ago, after upgrading Debian I discovered that I was no longer able to connect to my 5GHz wifi network, but could connect to 2.4GHz networks. Switching from NM to wicd fixed the problem. Same kernel, same wifi card and driver, same wifi AP with the same configuration. As baffling as it seems, getting rid of NM was the only thing I had to do, or could do, to make it work again. NM is now dead to me.

[akvadrako]

NetworkManager can work with iwd, which will give you the quickest available way of connecting to WiFi.