Hello nixers,
Which network manager do you use and is there any reasons for it.

There are a lot of options out there to configure wifi, ethernet, dns, ip, vpn, proxies, etc.. all in one place. We call the softwares handling this network managers.

You can do it manually by using wpa_supplicant, or ip, or whatnot.
You can use a terminal cli or curses such ass wifi-menu, nmcli, or nmtui.
You can use a graphical network manager such as the one that comes with the gnome desktop environment or the one that comes with KDE plasma.

There's more info on the Arch wiki however I'm looking for the reasons you use what you use.

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On my side, I use wifi-menu which is a simple curses wrapper over /etc/netctl (netctl) and wpa_supplicant. This only manages wifi and doesn't allow much configuration. As for ethernet I do it manually.

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So nixers, what network managers do you use?

I use wpa_supplicant + dhcpcd directly for Wifi. My internal network is usually configured statically from rc.d scripts or even systemd-networkd.

I don't like when dhcpcd mess with my DNS, so I usually use a static resolv.conf pointing at my own DNS.
For the VPNs, I handle them as normal daemons (they modify my resolv.conf though).

I know that this might sound boring, but once all this is setup, you don't touch it again :)

wpa_gui, usually. In other people's houses, wpa_cli is just not convenient.

These days I've got NetworkManager on my desktop because that's what came with the OS, and it "just works" for my simple home network.

The laptop is OpenBSD and I just use the built-in tools with a simple shell script wrapper.

I currently use wicd. It works!

For my Lenovo Thinkpad T420 laptop that runs OpenBSD -current I use `/etc/hostname.iwn0' which has a bunch of WiFi AP's on their own line using the `join' command. This allows me to have WiFi connectivity when I goto work, BSD group meeting, library, etc...

https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq6.html#Wireless

i used to use wicd-cli, but the pacman package is broken and i didn't check the aur package

i'm now using wpa_supplicant even manually (editing the config file) or just use the wpa_supplicant command. i didn't use eth anymoar but i would do it manually too

I used to be a fan of wpa_supplicant, when I used void, but since switching back to Debian, NetworkManager has been quite sufficient. If I had a proper desktop computer, I might reconsider my choices, but with a laptop, I really just want to connect and reconnect as easily as possible, without too much hassle, which is exactly what MATE's nm-applet does.

dhcpcd, wpa_supplicant. Used connman awhile back, but wpa_supplicant is pretty much default on every distro, and what's the first thing you generally want to do when installing a new distro? connect to the internet. so then once you do that it's done forever usually. however, I don't usually roam around with my chromebook all too much and have to connect to really bizarre networks you get out there.

wtf wildefyr you can't just jump out like that

network manager is pretty chill, the applet stuff just werks.

on the one hand i like my setup to be lightweight so i don't have a GUI for connecting to networks
on the other hand, i use NetworkManager (see the irony?)

so i use nmtui

simple, console based, just works

i used to use wpa_supplication and netctl for a long time. but i've gone back to just using networkmanager with dmenu

hadn't heard of nmtui, very tempted to use that now.

Just wpa_supplicant to authenticate a wireless interface against an access point, then whatever dhcp client is available to give ip addresses to that interface. You can easily generate the configuration stanza with wpa_passphrase. I don't usually use or install any of the higher level tools, like netctl/nmtui/wicd/connman.

I largely wrote the instructions here, if anyone wants a guide.