Proposal: Remove NetworkManager for WICD, perhaps after Lucid?

[J. Anthony Limon]

On Fri, 8 Jan 2010 23:53:59 +0100
Steve Dodier <sidnioulz at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2010/1/8 J. Anthony Limon <j at flippo.net>
> 
> > Network Manager is a tricky topic so I'll try to make this as
> > unbiased as possible.
> >
> > WICD offers a solid replacement to NetworkManager while keeping
> > almost all the features. The only thing I can think of that would
> > keep someone from switching outright is that Network Manager has
> > built-in VPN support. After a poll of some sort we could then
> > decide if we also needed to ship a VPN client by default.
> >
> > Also, since the next release is LTS it might make sense to wait to
> > make the switch as going from NetworkManager to WICD is as easy as
> > apt-get --purge autremove networkmanager
> >
> > - J
> 
> 
> 
> Despite the fact that I'm myself using wicd in one of my computers,
> there is a slight difference between wicd and networkmanager that we
> may not forget: the quality of the GUI.
> 
> I've rarely seen an app with a GUI as unwelcoming and badly designed
> as wicd, even though it has a great backend. I think nm does the job
> in 99% of the cases, so switching to something that is harder to
> learn and use is not, in my opinion, a good idea at all for an
> end-user distribution.
> 

While I will agree it's not as "pretty" as some apps, it's entirely
user friendly. As soon as you open it, it greets you with a list of
available networks and button that says CONNECT. Also, 2.0 should have
a new GUI, which if we're going to let NM remain in Lucid should
provide perfect timing.

- J