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

[Quackdoc]

Never used netplan, never really needed anything more then networkmanager but that might just be because im used to it. I have however tried to make network config agnosting stuff before, would rather let my balls be used as a boxer's speedbag then go through that again, if netplan can work out well, I could see netplan being incorporated into custom networking apps directly working quite well.

[F.Ultra]

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

dpkg --purge netplan
apt install NetworkManager

doesn't make sense, they solve two completely different tasks.

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.

The benefit is that your config gets network demon agnostic. Thanks to Netplan, Ubuntu switched seamless from NetworkManager to systemd-networkd on their servers a while back while having the desktops remain on NM and still admin was similar across the fleet.

[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)

[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.

[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

[royce]

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

[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.

[JPFSanders]

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

dpkg --purge netplan
apt install NetworkManager

[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.

[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.