NetworkManager

[Timothy Murphy]

What has happened to Network Management Settings
in recent versions of NM?
Right clicking on the NM icon (in Fedora-20/KDE)
brings up an unintelligible (to me) window
with 4 arrows whose function I do not understand.

Also NM is bringing up small "activation/deactivation" windows
that seem to persist indefinitely unless manually closed.

I wish there were an alternative to NM
which worked as well as the old Windows "Connect to".
Basically, I would like a small map showing available access points,
with the last point accessed chosen by default.
Clicking on one of the other access points
would indicate if an encryption key is needed,
and if so would offer a text area to allow this to be entered.
There used to be something like this in NM
(not as simple as Windows but at least usable),
but this seems to have disappeared.

In my view NM is ludicrously over-complicated,
and steadily getting more complicated
as more and more "features" are added.
I would like a program that just deals with WiFi
and does not bother with ethernet, VPN, mobile phones, etc,
all of which in my experience work perfectly well
with or without NM.
"A program should do one thing, and do it well."




-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland