I consider this important independently of any attempt at a graphical environment (#170).

With the removal of netctl we lack a way to easily configure WiFi networking, which nmtui gives us.

We have iwctl, but yes, nmtui is nicer.

nmtui also allows to more easily set up a connection using a static IP address. It's not so straightforward with systemd-networkd since it lacks a proper CLI or TUI frontend to configure the network.

So nmtui would provide a single interface to configure:

• Ethernet with a static IP address,
• Wi-Fi (but not WPA2-EAP based ones, NetworkManager issue 376),
• Mobile broadband (nope, NetworkManager issue 467).

You assigned me to this but I'm not familiar with archiso so I'm not sure how to implement this. Does the baseline or releng config need changing? Or both?

The official ISO is built from the releng profile, so only that one needs changing.

To implement this, you need to:

• add networkmanager to packages.x86_64,
• manually create symlinks, as systemct enable would do, to enable the units,
• remove the symlinks that enable systemd-networkd units,
• remove systemd-networkd configuration files,
• update the MOTD (it's uses raw ANSI escapes for setting colors),
• update the CHANGELOG.

Just for reference, there's a old and closed feature request on the Arch bug tracker: FS#54934.

/cc @torxed

This will affect archinstall's "Copy ISO configuration" network configuration option since the systemd-networkd configuration files will be removed.

@nl6720 Thank you for the heads up. What's the reasoning behind this change? I feel systemd-networkd is working surprisingly well out of the box the way it is pre-configured for 99% of the use cases I've come across.

I just saw Jan's comment about a graphical releng. Is that the soul reason?

From what I've been told, one of the reasons is to more easily connect to WPA2 Enterprise secured networks. Looking at NetworkManager issue 376 though, it doesn't look like there would be much improvement compared to the current situation.

In NetworkManager 1.42, nmtui supports configuring WPA Enterprise. 🎉

One issue with NetworkManager is that it phones home.

Then again, since reflector.service is enabled, we already phone home. 😟

There's no way to disable that?

I cam across this while deciding whether to use systemd-netword or NetworkManager. Interesting. Here's the discussion "from the other side": RedHat users demanding systemd-netword support.

From my experience, I can contribute that while there may be more UI interface support with NetworkManager, managing anything by editing configuration files is a nightmare. It is barely documented. The only way to achieve something (from my experience) is to find the proper nmcli command (a challenge by itself) and then see what modifications it causes in the configuration file and then take some educated guesses.

I like ArchLinux because it allows you to understand things from the ground up. NetworkManager is exactly the opposite. Some obscure complex beast that adds a layer of abstraction that nobody needs.