NetworkManager 1.46 Can Now Manage Ethtool EEE Settings, IPv4 DAD Default & 2FA VPNs

NetworkManager 1.46 was released on Thursday as the newest stable update to this software commonly used for managing Linux wired and wireless network connections from the Linux desktop as well as from command-line environments via the nmcli utility.

NetworkManager 1.46 brings a wide assortment of improvements for this Linux network management software. NetworkManager 1.46 adds support for the "wifi.cloned-mac-address=stable-ssid" option to randomize the MAC address based on the WiFi network. This is the option pursued by the likes of Fedora for better privacy on WiFi networks.

NetworkManager 1.46 also recognizes more udev properties, drops build support for Python 2 so only Python 3 is now supported, the nmcli utility will now show available WiFi bandwidth, WiFi device capabilities on the 6GHz band are now presented, support for Ethtool Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) settings, HSR/PRP interfaces support, enabling IPv4 Duplicate Address Detection (DAD) by default, supporting the MACsec offload mode, and support for two-factor authentication (2FA) from VPN plug-ins.

There is also documentation improvements, various bug fixes, and other core improvements with NetworkManager 1.46. As of writing there's still been no announcement to appear on NetworkManager.dev as the project site but for those interested NetworkManager 1.46 can be downloaded from GitHub.