The Internet Systems Consortium has stopped maintaining their DHCP client, which is standard on a lot of distros.
Debian has updated its documentation and now warns users to choose an alternative:
https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/isc-dhcp-client
On Debian Unstable, I was already forced to uninstall it in yesterday’s upgrade.
If you’re using network-manager, you don’t need to worry, since it includes its own dhcp client, but for others, this might be relevant.
On Arch, this concerns the dhcpd package:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dhcpd
Neither GNOME nor Plasma depend on NetworkManager, do they? Plasma will happily show information about connections managed by something else than NetworkManager, but won’t be able to manage them itself. But desktop distributions will most likely ship it as it covers basically all use cases.
Not directly, but distros may choose to create a dependency.
On Debian, installing recommended dependencies is enabled by default and disabling them can lead to all sorts of errors and missing functionality.
gnome-shell recommends gnome-control-center, which recommends network-manager-gnome, which depends on network-manager.
So unless you go out of your way to install a very minimal system, it gets pulled in.
From my point of view, nothing else but NetworkManager makes sense to ship by default for a distribution aimed at desktop use. So I fully understand distributions doing this. My point was rather that this is not related to any particular WM / DE.
I don’t think so. Dhcpcd + wpa_supplicant is really light, suitable for light installers, and live USB stick images.
I’ve been using dhcpcd + wpa_supplicant for so long… I do understand currently users prefer NM, but I hope there’s no push for it to be the unique way to manage network connectivity, and on light installers, I hope I’m not force to use NM either.
I mean traditionally NetworkManager uses wpa_supplicant anyways though there is the option for iwd. So it will stay available for quite some time.
Okay thanks. Makes sense that way. But de facto most Distros will ship it.