[arch-general] Why there is no NetworkManager in ArchISO

[Eli Schwartz]

On 07/24/2017 05:29 AM, Jelle van der Waa wrote:
> On 07/24/17 at 09:40am, Bennett Piater wrote:
>>
>>
>> On July 24, 2017 9:36:39 AM GMT+02:00, Junayeed Ahnaf via arch-general <arch-general at archlinux.org> wrote:
>>> All fine and good but I don't see arch being installed on something 
>>> other than desktop/laptop. Of course there are niche cases as arch 
>>> server I do not doubt but how much of arch install base is traditional 
>>> desktop? I think it's rather high.
>> You are missing the point. Many arch users don't simply install a desktop environment and use its defaults. 
>> If that's what you want, you may want to use another distribution, preferably one that focuses on your DE. 
>>
>> I use a very minimal setup without DE, and I don't want bloated catch-all solution that doesn't integrate nicely into my configuration, thank you very much. 
> 
> Y'all seem to miss the point that provided on the ISO != installed
> on your machine. I for one, don't see a problem with networkmanager
> being installed on the ISO, nmtui works pretty well (as does nmcli), I'm
> not sure however how much the ISO size will blow up.

Thanks, jelle, for being the sole voice of reason here. :)

The OP specifically asked about the archiso, not a "default
installation" (of which there is, of course, none).

For all the people here saying that NetworkManager is typically used by
bloated Desktop Environments, this is of course wrong too. As jelle
pointed out, nmntui/nmcli work great from a command-line environment;
somewhat ironically, the network-manager-applet used by Desktop
Environments is actually a *thirdparty* tool that communicates with the
actual NetworkManager daemon -- if swiss-army-knife tools are your
thing, NetworkManager is an amazingly capable, flexible, and powerful
tool for configuring and managing any sort of network from whatever CLI
or GUI environment you want.

Installing the packagelist from the archiso into a chroot, then
installing NetworkManager, indicates to me that on an i686 machine this
would add 60 MB to the installation base, which I consider a very
reasonable trade if it means getting rid of the horrible netctl.

Seriously, nearly everyone knows that netctl should have died a long
time ago. I am pretty sure most of the people who accidentally think
netctl is somehow an okay networking tool wouldn't think so if they
weren't led to believe it by its presence on the archiso; this in turn
would lower the support burden on #archlinux at freenode, and quite
possibly on the forums as well (though it feels like people panic over
netctl-not-working on IRC more often than the forums).

-- 
Eli Schwartz

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