We would like to finally announce that we are releasing a new version of plasma-nm. It took a lot of time but we hope the result speaks for itself. We focused mainly on design and workflow improvements because a lot of you were disappointed, so we discussed it with various people, blogged about it, did a lot of research etc. Many of you are involved in this release because your comments were valuable. There are also some people, without whom this release wouldn’t be in this state. Björn Balazs from User Prompt, who is a real expert on usability and did a great job in improving usability and shape of plasma-nm. Fabian Bornschein is a talented designer, author of Tilain plasma theme, who created for us a new nice set of icons. We will keep improving design and usability of plasma-nm even after this release, there is still a lot of work and we have also some plans for Plasma Next version and with the new VDG (Visual design group) containing a lot of talented designers, I believe we have what to look forward.
As usually, if you want to try this version of plasma-nm, you can compile it from git or download a tarball or wait until your distro packagers prepare an update.
Do not forget to report your bugs or send us your ideas. Unfortunately we were not able to include all your requests in this release, but we will try our best in future. Thanks to all involved in this release and we hope you will enjoy it as we enjoyed doing it.
In Kubuntu 14.04, THE perfect release for me 🙂
Congrats, you all did great work on this. Looking forward to using plasma-nm!
And it is already available for arch! Great to play with it 😉
Playing with it quickly, I found a possible improvement:
After clicking the refresh button, the list of available networks should have an overlay with an animated reload icon to give some feedback to the user (or shortly clear the list and rebuild it again or something alike).
Arch always has a new plasma-nm version as first, even before Fedora, where I do updates.
Right, it should have probably some feedback, because now it looks it does nothing when you click on the button.
I have been using it on Debian Sid for a while now, and I am loving it!. 🙂
Great job, thank you for all your efforts.
Bravo! Usability was the biggest issue with the network manager. Using Kubuntu 14.04, I can say I really dig the new stuff!
Installed from your COPR and was working fine. Then came along KDE SC 4.12 update and even though connecting works fine, the applet looks ’empty’ – see screenshot at http://imgur.com/7dXq3pk. If I do a ‘systemctl restart NetworkManager.service’, applet repopulates interfaces and connections correctly.
Fedora 20, i686, kde-runtime-4.12.2, kde-workspace-4.11.6, kde-plasma-nm-0.9.3.3-2.201402137586912.
You can update it from updates-testing now, there was a problem with NetworkManager, but a new update is also available (NetworkManager-0.9.9.0-31.git20131003.fc20), so just update it and also update kde-plasma-nm from updates testing and everything should work.
Indeed, the last update seem to have fixed the problem. Thanks!
Good job, but I have to repeat my wish/feature list and hope that something will be implemented soon:
1. How can I connect to the hidden SSID from the applet?
2. Could you add tabs, to filter interfaces and connection types?
– something like | All | Connected | Interfaces (includes Hardware + Virtual) | Wireless | VPNs |
– see http://imgur.com/j9tpDZJ
3. Could you make configurable which information to display about active/available connections in the list view? Some advanced mode – activation via shortcut or by default? I’m a network administrator and such information would be useful to me..
– wired (ethernet) – speed, mtu, …
– wireless – channel(freq)/band, strength, speed, security, BSSID
– see http://imgur.com/j9tpDZJ
4. http://user-prompt.com/connect-to-network-manager-prototype/#comment-3368
5. Connect/disconect via double-click.
6. Eliminate the need to mouse moving and scrolling and improve feel when using keyboard.
7. Display graphs/details with right-click or ctrl+left-click or some keyboard shortcut.
8. Could you add button (+ ctrl+left-click or some keyboard shortcut) to Connect/Disconect to the selected connection in the Connection editor.
9. Tooltip with detailed information when mouse over the system tray icon or it could be activated in combination with some key (ctrl, meta).
10. Option to Delete/Hide Bluetooth connections from Available Connections.
Thank you
Hello, nice job!
One question though: why is the widget so wide on my computer: http://imgur.com/t9vJHKp ?
Is there some configuration option I set up wrong? I don’t usually work with the nm applet open, so the screen space isn’t really a productivity problem, but it makes the window very uncomfortable to process, at least. And since it doesn’t seem to be the intended appearance (judging from the preview you posted on this blog)…
Hi, you can resize it, just drag the top left corner and move it to size you like.
Haaa, awesome! 😀
Thanks, sorry for not noticing that!
Wow that was odd. I just wrote an very long comment but after
I clicked submit my comment didn’t show up.
Grrrr… well I’m not writing all that over again. Anyhow, just wanted to
say great blog!
I’m no longer able to connect to multiple vpns, is that an intended change or a bug. It was the single reason why I used the nm implementation from kde until now.
As I know NetworkManager doesn’t allow to have more then one active VPN connection.
Hmm, the former KDE client of nm did just that, however this was possible. Anyway I really do need the possiblity to connect to more then one vpn at the same time, nm should really support this by now, although I see that leaves the scope of the plasma client.
I just checked that and I was able to have active VPNC and L2TP vpns together. Would be better to report a bugreport with information about your version of NetworkManager and plasma-nm.