Re: proposal: dhcpcd-base as standard DHCP client starting with Trixie
On Tue, 20 Jun 2023 at 11:42, Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 20 Jun 2023 at 05:03:19 -0400, nick black wrote:
> > Simon McVittie left as an exercise for the reader:
> > > At the moment I believe the status quo for d-i is that networking is
> > > managed by NetworkManager if a desktop task happens to have pulled it in,
> > > or ifupdown otherwise? And that seems reasonable (although I personally
> > > prefer to set up systemd-networkd on servers).
> >
> > i don't wish to start an argument, but just to ask: everyone has
> > recommended NetworkManager for workstations. i've been running
> > systemd-networkd on everything (servers, laptops, and
> > workstations) for several years now, usually in conjunction with
> > dnsmasq and wpa_supplicant, and it's been pretty great. what
> > does NetworkManager offer that makes it superior to
> > systemd-networkd on the desktop (which i'm interpreting to mean
> > "for interactive use")?
>
> Ubiquitous user interfaces, mostly. Our default for laptops and other
> portable computers needs to be something that lets a non-technical user
> of GNOME/Plasma/etc. join a wireless network, without learning how to
> write configuration files and operate sudo, and in practice that means
> the various desktop environments' UIs for NM (or something analogous
> like connman or wicd, but NM seems to be by far the best-supported choice
> out of those).
>
> I don't know enough about implementation details of NM and
> systemd-networkd to know whether the API design of NM is more suitable
> for that purpose, or whether the various UIs for NM and the absence of
> UIs for systemd-networkd is just inertia; but in practice the network
> configuration service that has first-class support in most of our desktop
> environments (in particular GNOME and Plasma) is NM.
>
> I was using "desktop" in the sense of task-gnome-desktop and friends, more
> than as a class of hardware. Laptops and other portable computers are the
> main thing that really needs easily user-configurable networking.
> I think it makes sense for desktop/workstation hardware to be treated like
> an oddly-shaped laptop by default, which means it gets the benefit of the
> wider testing that goes into NM and its various user interfaces, rather
> than having laptops and desktops behave differently for reasons that are
> unlikely to be obvious to a new user.
>
> Some users of desktop/workstation hardware strongly prefer to use a more
> "static" network configuration service like systemd-networkd or ifupdown
> so that they can rely on having the network setup not change under
> them, particularly if they're using services like NFS filesystems or
> LDAP authentication. That's an entirely reasonable thing to want to do,
> but IMO this is an example of the design principle that the choice that
> is better for non-technical users can make a better default, because
> technically adept users who know they have particular requirements can
> easily switch to what we might characterize as "server" infrastructure,
> but non-technical users can't easily switch in the opposite direction
> (or even know that they might want to).
>
> A secondary benefit of NM is that it works on non-systemd-booted systems,
> whereas systemd-networkd isn't designed for that use. I'm personally
> happy with systemd as pid 1, but some people consider requiring systemd
> as pid 1 to be a deal-breaker, and if NM is a good candidate for being
> our default *anyway* then we might as well get that secondary benefit too.
Yes a fully working and well-integrated GUI is the most important
thing for the default (as in, desktop tasklet default), power users
can always switch to something else. NetworkManager is clearly ahead
of the alternatives in that regard.
Kind regards,
Luca Boccassi
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