I get the Network part, but Manager?

Using open-source software is a good idea for a few reasons—user-driven improvements, customization, the price tag—but when it comes to most applications, the biggest draw is choice. There are dozens of open source music players, none of which will slow you down with DRM bullshit or restrict you to a single store to choose from. Same with chat software, photo managers, browsers and e-mail clients.

And what of wireless network clients?

Absolute shit.

I don’t get why it is so. I’m sure Linux nerds were first on the whole wireless networking tip back when people still listened to Heavy D. But here we are, stuck with the current champ of lameness among the standard software offerings for KDE: Network Manager. There seems to be only one decent alternative, wicd, which I haven’t put through the paces just yet. But this article is dedicated solely to the crappiness of its lone rival, ever failing upwards.

The root of the problem might be this: Network Manager (now version 0.7) was originally built for GNOME, not KDE. But really, that shouldn’t be that big of a deal. There’s tons of software that fits that description but doesn’t fail horribly enough for me to write about it.

But I could be wrong. The basic problem seems to be NetMan’s relationship with the KWallet, KDE’s universal password manager. The version of NetMan now shipping with KDE 4.2 is less buggy compared to the last version, but the fundamental problems remain the same:

I have a weak wireless card on my ancient laptop, so I get kicked off even my own network very often. (I don’t even want to talk about public networks, like NYURoam. At Bobst Library, I have to damn near steal peoples’ desks just to get into the wireless sweet spots.) But despite the fact that the network passwords are stored in KWallet, after a couple times it will ask for the password again. What the fuck? Why do I have a password manager if I have to keep typing in the password?
KWallet asks me to type in the universal password every time I start a session, which would be fine if KWallet worked with NetMan like it does with KMail (i.e., flawlessly). So NetMan ruins two pieces of software for the price of one!
Sometimes, as shitty wireless cards are wont to do, connectivity breaks, but NetMan will show that it’s still connected. When I try to reconnect by clicking on the SSID in the NetMan menu, it—guess what?—asks for my password, even if the password has been stored and it luckily hasn’t been arbitrarily demanding passwords in the session so far.
While the graphics are improved, they’re still prone to overlapping and other screwups.
When connection breaks and NetMan automatically tries to reconnect, it won’t say which SSID it’s trying to connect to. It may well be some other SSID, meaning NetMan is just wasting your time.
Sometimes—and I have to use this word often since the piece of shit is so unreliable—it’ll do the same thing when you manually choose the SSID. How hard is this?
Same as when NetMan tries to reconnect and asks for a password. I have no idea which SSID is asking for a password! So I can’t even troubleshoot my wireless connections properly, because half the time I don’t know if I’m actually connecting to my router or wasting my time with someone else’s.
When it does show which SSID you’re logging into when it asks you to re-enter your password, it will provide a "remember this password" option. Too bad it doesn’t.
Not only will it show it’s connected when it’s obviously not. It will even still show it’s connected while it’s reconnecting.
Some of the locally available SSIDs get hidden because the pop-up display is poorly designed. NetMan can let you choose how many SSIDs to show, but it doesn’t help with the bits hidden behind the panel.
Oh yeah—and the shit crashes and takes the whole Plasma panel with it.

There are some pluses. For example, Virtual Private Networking actually works, even for networks using Cisco’s proprietary VPN system. The free vpnc plugin for NetMan works like a charm.

But of course, I spent weeks thinking it didn’t, because NetMan kept kicking me off, asking for passwords, and not telling me which of the dozens of SSIDs I was picking up in Greenwich fucking Village NetMan was actually trying to log into.

Basically, this is the worst piece of software shipping by default with the dozens of Linux distributions using KDE. What a goddamned waste of time.

Time I gave wicd a try. I have no choice. My only other alternative is prayer. End.