If you haven't used Network Manager in years, I'd suggest taking another look. It (like PulseAudio) was shipped far too early, souring early-adopters on its use.

Later kernels have (somewhat) cleaned up the wireless driver interface so these days I don't have problems with day-to-day usage of Network Manager.

PulseAudio still requires you to be a hacker to get sound over network - something it promised to do well, but oh doesnt.

If you aren't blessed with luck, one might say that PulseAudio still requires you to be a hacker to get sound. Over and over again. Every time you think it's fixed for good, it'll prove you wrong.

On the large majority of laptops I've installed Ubuntu on recently, sound has just worked out of the box, so here's to hoping my lucky streak continues!

Sure, sound works fine for a bit, but wait until you want to plug a USB headset in. First time, great. Second time, fail. Log out, log back in, headset works again. Lame!

It's all about having a common hardware profile.

Add any external sound hardware, use a optical or SPDIF port instead, add some speakers. It'll break sooner-or-later, and in my own experiences it tends to be whenever my personal computer gets away from the 'typical' desktop profile.

Try to plug in headset and have the sound out of it, plug it out and have the sound on the laptop speakers, without going all hacker on it, or for example just try to use your bluetooth headset. Yeah. Nope.

Or if you're even less lucky, PulseAudio still requires you to mute the "system sounds" thing because once skype starts, you get persistent noise out of the audio jack, after which you try to email Lennart following the guide on his page, only to receive no reply.

My current regular experience is:

Pulse audio + reconnecting bluetooth speaker after it powers off = bad day

+1 I tried for an hour to get PulseAudio to work with Bluetooth and A2DP and use my phone as a sound source. Decided I wasn't going to waste time on this. Gave up and ended up buying an external A2DP box off Amazon and plugged it into my Line In port.

It is this little things that made me move away from GNU/Linux as main laptop OS.

The OS is great when it works, but then those little things are always around the corner, turning weekend actions into weeks.

All of my computers run Linux, but that's because I can deal with most of the flaws. This is definitely part of the reason why desktop Linux has never taken off with the general public.

Also, the people who manage Linux distributions seem to absolutely love suddenly getting rid of things that work and replacing them with incomplete alternatives, without any kind of migration of user data and settings. Those alternatives should be pushed out as developer previews until they either

(1) match each and every feature of whatever they are replacing AND capable of importing all settings

OR

(2) warn the user months ahead of time with a list of features that are going to disappear in the replacement

OR

(3) provide an easy, 1-click option to let the user continue using whatever they were using as their default, with continued support and updates

Indeed.

But it is still my main OS everywhere, I refuse to bow to proprietary overlords. Despite these downsides.

I started working when proprietary overlords was the only option available, so it doesn't matter me that much.

What you mean?

I too perform work for enterprises, getting payed to work with and in all things Linux, Java and Python.

Just because its freedom software doesnt mean there is no money to be made or make.

I mean when I started working there wasn't open source as such.

Maybe the local computer club or some rich guys that could pay for BBS connections exchanging stuff.

Everything from hardware, text processing, drawing, music, compilers, editors,..., was provided by proprietary overlords.

Oh, you are ancient - respect!

I had luck, started around 1999 when RedHat 6.2 existed, with gcc, all from a free book and CD from the public library.

Years ago it didn't take me that long to get PulseAudio setup to play from my HTPC through my laptop (so that I could use the headphone jack on the laptop). That said, it wasn't plug-and-play. I didn't use it too often because there were too many moving parts every time I wanted to get it setup (i.e. setup the laptop to receive audio, then get the HTPC to connect to the laptop and send audio... then disable it all to get things back to normal afterwards).

What would have been preferable would be for the HTPC to advertise itself as a audio source, and the laptop to be able to list sources, and let the use select one.

I had been using wicd on my old laptop for a few years. Then, when configuring a new computer, wicd failed to work on it. I tried, probably, everything, even the most low level CLI tools, but still connection kept failing, and frustratingly, it was providing almost no information about what was going wrong.. Then, I installed XFCE to had some temporary GUI, and its NM connected to WiFi. Now, I'm using NM, and still have no idea, why other tools did not work for me.

Years ago, I had issues with several hotel wifis on the east coast. I found that completely disabling NetworkManager and manually connecting was the only work-around. But NetworkManager had to be disabled from startup. If it was started at any point, even if the service was stopped (and a manual connection was attempted) I couldn't connect to the network.

It's hit-or-miss.

Yeah, NM rarely works correctly

"Ah why don't you open a bug", because people are not interested in making it work (like a lot of "modern" Linux stuff)

If it works manually (dhcp, wpa_supplicant, etc), I don't see what's the problem. Or better, I see: NM doesn't work.

Yeah, unfortunately you're right about WiFi chips. It's about making the bare minimum hardware and shoving everything onto the drivers.

NM tries to be too clever. I have no idea what some of the options in the interface mean.

Contrary to what other commenters are saying, I've been using NetworkManager on my ArchLinux Thinkpads for years and it works great. (And I don't even have a desktop environment, I have DWM, so I am usually a "do it yourself" person.)

Whereas I could never get all the mess working to get things working well without NetworkManager.

My experience is, spend hours messing with configuration shit or just let NetworkManager do all that automatically for you, which in my case, it does well.

Network Manager uses wpa_supplicant underneath, and delegates roaming and AP selection to it. So I don't know how what should be a dump program on top gets such a bad wrap.

Not that I don't use wpa_supplicant directly anyway, but when I have used NM, it seems to do the same job.

I'm also a DIY person. Using networkd already along with systemd and wpa_supplicant. It's very simple and reliable.

I use wpa_supplicant on Raspberry Pi. It works fine even with bad WiFi signal, though I have trouble with Samba client. It forgets to reconnect to SMB server every few weeks after dozens of WiFi reconnects. Tracking down the issue and filing a bug is a bit complicated (automated embedded device, WiFi signal noise, etc).

Your voltage on the USB port might be too low.

I always had troubles with the managers too, and now use wpa_supplicant directly combined with systemd-networkd. When a connection is established networkd automatically starts dhcp. I think it connects faster, and I've had no problems with wifi since I switched.

Same here, I kind of never got NetworkManager to do any good, I just gave up, so mii-tool, dhcpcd, iwconfig, wpa_supplicant are well used tools, basically it works fine, when I actually have the drivers. These tools dont bail out on me or try to hide complexities behind more complex abstractions like NetworkManager does. If im going to be troubleshooting anything, its going to be the networking issue and not dbus to networkmanager interface or policy files.

So basically you need four different tools to set up networking? Well, it sure sounds like the complexities are there and in plain sight then. I can't help but wonder though if it isn't possible to get rid of some of these complexities and make life simpler?

I dont know, possibly, I see now that mii-tool is packaged together with ip. So really, it depends, it is different layers - different tools , but could still package all together into one package and have one syntax for all. wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd should go under the net-tools/ip package too.

ip link should also show the information of link-speed from mii-tool, ip addr should take an dhcp argument instead of requiring a separate dhcpcd. Then merge wpa_supplicant into ip, perhaps make a ip-wlink which requires some SSID/keyphrase to set it to "up" state.

So wpa_supplicant dhcpcd iwconfig/iwlist/scan-tools should be merged to net-tools and have same syntax as the rest of the net-tools package.

But yeah, even then you need to learn the layers and set them up. In my opinion Windows got it wrong, its user interface is horrible and people often complain about networking problems which are really UI problems or bugs in Windows/drivers there too.

This problem is classic - networking is a stack and thats a fact, and the best tools/UI is one which allows you to dig through that stack layer by layer. On windows its all or nothing.

It's not as complicated as it sounds in practice and can take the form of a simple config block in /etc/network/interfaces

        iface wlan0 inet dhcp

                wireless-essi DE:C0:D1:F1:ED  

                wireless-mode managed  

                wpa-ssid "Your SSID"  

                wpa-psk "YourPassword123"

I wrote a python app/CLI program for dealing with those couple of programs.

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wifi/0.3.1

It works ok and just wraps ifup and iwlist. It also reads and writes /etc/network/interface style config, so you can see what's going on under the hood.

But I agree. Getting it all work the first time (or when I encounter a new type of network) is just ridiculous.