this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
924 points (96.6% liked)
linuxmemes
20463 readers
359 users here now
I use Arch btw
Sister communities:
- LemmyMemes: Memes
- LemmyShitpost: Anything and everything goes.
- RISA: Star Trek memes and shitposts
Community rules
- Follow the site-wide rules and code of conduct
- Be civil
- Post Linux-related content
- No recent reposts
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What I really don't understand is why distro maintainers feel the need to actually go along with these changes. Like, sure, if this predictable interface naming thing worked as intended, I can definitely see how it can be useful for server administrators. You could just hardcode the automatic interface names instead of assigning them manually in
/etc/mactab
. But why would the rest of us ever need this? Most personal machines have at most one wifi card and one ethernet device, sowlan0
andeth0
are perfectly predictable. And even if you have multiple wifi or ethernet adapters, your networking is probably handled by network-manager, so you never actually have to put interface names into config files. Why force enterprise-grade bloat on users who just want a simple desktop experience?Personally I'd do away with NetworkManager too and just configure the interfaces directly, but that might just be me being old and grumpy!
I think most distros go along because their upstream did. There are comparatively few 'top level' distributions, the main ones (by usage) being Redhat and Debian. Most everything else branches from those. Redhat's got enough clout on the market that there's a sort of pull towards complying with it just to not be left put.
I use Debian, but I think they're crazy for swallowing everything Redhat pushes, they could easily stick to the cleaner options and have a better system for it. At least they let you opt out of systemd, so life is a little more tolerable.
I'd do away with network-manager on a stationary system too, but I'm on a laptop, and unless there's some trick I don't know about, configuring wifi by hand for every new network I come across sounds like a bit of a pain. Especially for corporate/institution network that use fancy things like PEAP
If by "configuring wifi by hand" you mean writing config files by hand, that's actually not necessary with plain wpa_supplicant too. There is
wpa-gui
(orwpa-cute
if you prefer Qt over GTK), which is basically a GUI frontend to wpa_supplicant, which makes adding new networks nearly as easy as with NetworkManager. But it's a far less modern looking UI than the NM frontends.Thanks for the info, I'll take a look. "far less modern looking" is a selling point for me haha. Give me those win95-looking gtk2 interfaces!