What exactly is the point of networkmanager?

[Red Squirrel]

I often find myself having issues such as network interface settings being overwritten, /etc/resolv.conf being overwritten etc.... always turns out to be networkmanager, and uninstalling it fixes all the issues. What purpose does this app serve, is there a more accepted way to deal with those issues or am I ok to just uninstall it?

 

[MrColin]

nm is best suited to mobile devices where manually changing all of the settings wherever you go would be cumbersome. removing it should be fine if you know how to configure your networking without it.

 

[bobross419]

NM generally works pretty well as long as you use NM to configure networks. If you prefer to manually hack on files you're better off disabling/uninstalling it as you've discovered. I haven't had issues using it as long as I only make network changes through NM.

 

[KenJackson]

I think the point of it is to make Linux usable for people who can't configure a network. It's goal seems to be to takeover total control of all things networking and try to make it "just work". Hopefully, it cuts down the number of people who would otherwise loudly gripe, moan and advertise that they tried Linux but just couldn't get it to work.

But like you, I find NetworkManager to be a total nuisance and always disable it.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Good to know, so guessing to use NM you need the GUI? So yeah for servers I may as well just uninstall it as I rarely install a GUI.

 

[Jodell88]

Network Manager also has a cli interface. If you don't need it you can uninstall it.

 

[anthero]

The purpose of Network manager is to take up space until you remove it and install wicd