Canonical's Netplan 1.1 Improves Compatibility With Proton VPN & Microsoft's Azure Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Canonical's Netplan 1.1 Improves Compatibility With Proton VPN & Microsoft's Azure Linux

For Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Canonical released Netplan 1.0 as their declarative network configuration software spanning now from servers to desktops. In time for Ubuntu 24.10 due out in two months, Netplan 1.1 has been released as the next iteration of this Linux networking configuration software from Canonical...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Netplan-1.1-Released

[fitzie]

this is the one area that I'd want systemd to conquer. the networking setup stack is a fragmented mess and the major distributions are focused on their own solutions rather then convergence around networkd.

[intelfx]

this is the one area that I'd want systemd to conquer. the networking setup stack is a fragmented mess and the major distributions are focused on their own solutions rather then convergence around networkd.

It'd be a very good thing to have indeed. But the amount of work to get there would be pretty severe. networkd is a really damn good implementation of core networking concepts, but despite the efforts to support dynamic reconfiguration it's still kinda lacking in that regard. This will have to change before the general purpose (non-server) Linux ecosystem can start trying to coalesce around networkd.

[aviallon]

It'd be a very good thing to have indeed. But the amount of work to get there would be pretty severe. networkd is a really damn good implementation of core networking concepts, but despite the efforts to support dynamic reconfiguration it's still kinda lacking in that regard. This will have to change before the general purpose (non-server) Linux ecosystem can start trying to coalesce around networkd.

Networkd will need to have D-Bus compatibility with Network Manager first.
It will need to be drop-in compatible as far as Desktop Environments are concerned, for it to gain a real traction.

[JPFSanders]

The very first thing I do with Netplan on servers and workstations is:

dpkg --purge netplan
apt install NetworkManager

[Chugworth]

I don't like that layered config-on-config stuff. systemd-networkd works just fine, even with fancy stuff like interface bonding with a bridge interface and several VLANs.

It's a similar situation in the Linux firewall world. For example, in the KDE Plasma settings menu, there's a page for firewall configuration. Yet it requires ufw or firewalld to work. Again with the layered business, nftables is the native Linux kernel firewall and it works just fine! Just make the GUI interface control that.

[royce]

Netplan is actually really good, and a necessity if you're working a lot with cloud-init.

[szymon_g]

The very first thing I do with Netplan on servers and workstations is:

dpkg --purge netplan
apt install NetworkManager

user1@ubugrat:~$ sudo apt install NetworkManager
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package NetworkManager

NM is installed by default on ubu lts

[Daktyl198]

this is the one area that I'd want systemd to conquer. the networking setup stack is a fragmented mess and the major distributions are focused on their own solutions rather then convergence around networkd.

The networking stack isn't really that fragmented. There's only really 3 solutions that I know of. Doing it raw yourself (IP), systemd-networkd, and NetworkManager. Most headless systems use systemd-networkd and most GUIs hook into NetworkManager. Netplan is a system on top that lets you take a configuration and copy it across any system and have it generate configurations for that system no matter what stack it's running. This way, you can copy networking configurations between headless, and GUI systems easily/etc. It's actually a really good system and most of Ubuntu's networking customers love it.

If anything, netplan is the "unification" that you're looking for. The effort to get networkd into a state where GUIs would be comfortable using it would take ages.

[ahrs]

Networkd will need to have D-Bus compatibility with Network Manager first.
It will need to be drop-in compatible as far as Desktop Environments are concerned, for it to gain a real traction.

Or you just teach NetworkManager about Systemd Networkd. After all, being an abstraction for network configuration is sort of its point. It doesn't really matter if NetworkManager is generating Systemd drop-in files behind the scene and communicating to Systemd via networkctl (or most likely whatever DBus API or socket, etc, this communicates with)