Dear KDE Team,

First of all although I have been heavy user of KDE ever since my switch to Linux back in 2002 and having interacted with the distributors, I have never been here all long time, interesting. So the day is today.

Congratulations for the best desktop on the face of the earth.

I would like to bring something to KDE Management team and hope it is received as a valid criticism and helps improve KDE and its adoption.

As we all know networking became more and more important as we started have multiple wireless and ethernet connections, VPNs on top of them etc. I fully understand the challenge to put together an adequate tool to answer all these needs.

And it is no news that while providing the great infrastructure, L&F, user friendliness, complementary tools, etc, KDE has fallen behind of GNOME (and even Windows) on the networking frontier. Given that networking is an indispensable part for a daily user, I think this fact has great influence on KDE adoption. Until recently, distributors shipped KDE with nm-applet. But these days AFAIK, almost all distros bundle knetworkmanager as the default nm in KDE.

You know that everybody has problem with printer, ADSL connection etc. and as they have such problems the first person they call are the we software engineers. As being a guy with a kubuntu CD in his pocket all the time I stopped *free windows support to family and friends* and if people have problems I respond to them "Shall I install kubuntu?". And then the first problem they have are usually the networking problems.

Therefore, I would kindly like to ask KDE team to throw more resources in to fill the gap. I hear that knetworkmanager development is stopped and plasmoid is given way to become the next nm ui in KDE. I also hear that the devs there are busy with some other commitments and hardly find enough time to finish it up.

If this is not possible, distro providers should be asked to rather then giving incomplete knetworkmanager as the default nm, they should *for now*
fall back (again) to nm-applet until KDE has one that is up to the task.

Regards,
Hasan Ceylan

I have not encountered any issues myself with the Network Management Applet. It functions both with my wireless network ( WPA ) and my Nokia phone over bluetooth ( Mobile Broadband - needs blueman to make NetworkManager aware of it however, but this is NetworkManager's fault, and also experienced by GNOME )

I and my development team at the office are experiencing all the problems ranging from crashes to menu not disappearing after some action, becoming unresponsive to icon clicks or displaying like 10px height menu.

I personally use, wireless connections, mobile connection, VPNC / openvpnn connections...

Personally I'm satisfied with KNetworkManager: the WLAN works - WEP.WPA2,WPA Enterprise -, the VPN works. Since yesterday I noticed the plasmoid being back again and tried that one. As both share the same data everything was fine I thought. The GUI is clear and easy to understand but It doesn't show any Networks... maybe a configuration problem or a problem of my distribution. If I use KNetworkManager to do the actual connecting, the plasmoid shows the active WLAN connections. I will keep in my systemtray and observe it a little. But it seems promising.

For the Applet, you need to have the KDE Daemon module loaded.

Code: Select all

qdbus org.kde.kded /kded loadModule networkmanagement

I did as you posted but no result. But I'm still ok with knetworkmanager

I have had nothing but trouble with KNetworkmanager (KNM) since K4 first came out. After spending many hours fiddling with it, and the painful Kwallet, I discovered, and now use WICD. Last week I did a clean install of openSUSE 11.3, spent at least half an hour getting KNM to connect for one reason, to download and install WICD, then delete KNM & NM in toto.
I tried to get KNM to work so many times, I wanted it to work, but it didn't, over and over again.
If the KDE developers want to throw help at a networking solution, it should be WICD, which, if help is given, will a match KNM for types of connection by the 2.0 release,eg VPN, Mobile etc(the next release).

Support for WICD would likely be implemented as a Solid backend (if someone writes such a thing), so the "painful" KWallet would still be used if so.

einar wrote:Support for WICD would likely be implemented as a Solid backend (if someone writes such a thing), so the "painful" KWallet would still be used if so.

Why? WICD works well now without Kwallet, why would it have to be forced to use it if it was given 'support'. I doubt the WICD developers would want that (though I do not speak for them) and I certainly wouldn't want WICD wrecked by forcing a requirement for KWallet.
What I meant by support was implementation of other methods of connection like VPN or mobile.