Network management question

[novsky]

Hi guys.

Quick question. I've been running Mageia 4 Live KDE, exploring it, and i can see that the wifi icon is not stock. + establishing a network was different to my networkmanager experience. Then I've seen the network center in the MCC: http://doc.mageia.org/mcc/4/en/content/ ... enter.html
Is that a Mageia specific way of handling the internet connections? If yes, is it possible to get stock KDE systray icons for it, so it's not green?
Is Network center better than alternatives (networkmanager, nm-applet and nm plasmoid?).

Thanks and as a welcome, i'm learning to inkscape slowly, so here's a little picture i made as an homage to your distribution as my learning experience.

[doktor5000]

Is that a Mageia specific way of handling the internet connections? If yes, is it possible to get stock KDE systray icons for it, so it's not green?

Yes, it is Mageia-specific, it is the default and called net_applet. You'd have to exchange the icons yourself, they are located below /usr/share/libDrakX/pixmaps/

Is Network center better than alternatives (networkmanager, nm-applet and nm plasmoid?).

Judging from long experience and quite a lot of frustrated users and bugs, it is definitely worse. There are also some longstanding bugs,
that usually happen when you switch between different wireless networks.

Apart from that, networkmanager's native nm-applet and the KDE plasmoid, plasma-applet-nm offer the same functionality, as they are simply two different frontends to the same backend.
Also using plasma-applet-nm here since over a year and I'd never go back. I'd always encourage users to switch to networkmanager, as it's upstream is actually alife.

[novsky]

Judging from long experience and quite a lot of frustrated users and bugs, it is definitely worse. There are also some longstanding bugs,
that usually happen when you switch between different wireless networks.

Apart from that, networkmanager's native nm-applet and the KDE plasmoid, plasma-applet-nm offer the same functionality, as they are simply two different frontends to the same backend.
Also using plasma-applet-nm here since over a year and I'd never go back. I'd always encourage users to switch to networkmanager, as it's upstream is actually alife.

Than why is it actually used as default? for the sake of uniformity, or...?

[doktor5000]

Because it was always the default and because of the integration with the installer, hardware recognition and the integration with the Mageia control center.
It requires quite some efforts to port all those to networkmanager (or anything else for that matter).

[novsky]

Thanks for your answers, Doktor5k