16.04: Graphical login/desktop vanished? (coming closer)

Paul Smith paul at mad-scientist.net
Mon Jul 25 20:15:07 UTC 2016


On Mon, 2016-07-25 at 21:57 +0200, Josef Wolf wrote:
> The question is: why is there this dependancy of the desktop from NM
> in the first place? Is there any reason why a desktop can't exist
> without such a russian roulette software like NM?

I can't say.  It could be many layers deep.  Many desktops rely on
network-manager because it manages the network, and the desktop network
configuration facilities offload their responsibilities to it (for
example via network-manager-gnome or whatever).

You'll have to trace down the dependency list (maybe aptitudes --show-
deps will help) and discuss the situation with the maintainers of the
offending package(s).

Alternatively you could try to create a "dummy network-manager" package
which provided network-manager but didn't install anything, then pin
it.  Or something like that.

> I KNOW how my network is structured. NM is trying to GUESS how it is
> structured. I don't want any software to GUESS. I prefer to TELL
> EXCATLY.

I'm not sure what you mean by "guess".  In every environment I've been
in for the last 5 years at least everyone just uses DHCP to tell hosts
about network structure, and NM handles that just fine.  Also NM does a
lot more: it handles proxying, it handles VPNs very well, it deals with
roaming and wireless for mobile systems, etc.  It does have some
annoying things (see a thread I posted a few weeks ago complaining
about it constantly roaming every 2 minutes... and the workaround I
found).

NM is one of those things that had a very rocky start, and so people
have bad impressions of it from using it when it was younger.  However,
I use it as-is on all my desktops and laptops and (with the exception
of the above issue with a poorly-written proprietary wireless driver
from Broadcom) it works just fine and doesn't bother me anymore.  And
I've been configuring networking on Linux since forever... even dialup!

YMMV of course.




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