Looking for recommendations for software to manage network interfaces and connection on a Linux (debian) notebook. Before you answer. The reason I’m asking here is that I hope to reach other network techs. That is, people who may desire more deliberate control over connections, rather than automatically connecting to what your machine thinks is the current best option.
I’m using wicd, but see it’s fallen out of maintenance and is not currently available in Bullseye.
Further, wicd (or dhclient) started causing me pain when I upgraded to Buster. After the upgrade, should I connect to a network without a functioning dhcp server, wicd makes me wait a minute or more while it repeatedly tries to reach a dhcp server, and there is no way to abandon these attempts.
Because my job is to troubleshoot other people’s networks, I’m frequently connecting to new networks, both wired and wireless. Prefer to do so deliberately, using a GUI (ncurses would be fine) that will quickly display available networks, and let me switch between with ease. Also, not uncommon that I manually configure IP from cli: ip addr add n.n.n.n/mm .... Solution needs to allow this tinkering w/o mucking things up. I do depend on wicd’s tray status icon to quickly see status and current IP address.
I used Network Manager very briefly years ago and hated it. I hear it’s gotten much better, but I imagine it’s still geared towards regular users, who typically just want the best network to be connected for them automatically. That’s not me. Also, if it matters, I also run libvirt qemu-kvm on my notebook, as well as on several client servers, so solution needs to play well with libvirt virtualized networks.