My (not so good) user experience with gnome and networking

[Jonas Thiem <jonasthiem googlemail com>]

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(this is a resend since I forgot to subscribe at first)

Hi,

I had a rather unfavorable experience with Gnome 3.10.2 and networking.
In the interest of documenting it and enabling you to possibly change
things for the better, let me write it down here:

Gnome 3/networkmanager with multiple wifi cards:

1.) it isn't possible to disconnect one from the current network
without setting the network to never autoconnect, and then disabling
wifi entirely system-wide for all cards and re-enabling it. There is
simply no disconnect button, and the turn off button doesn't work as
expected (see next point).

2.) it isn't possible to turn off just one wifi card to force the use
of just one of them, since turning off one card through the gnome
shell user menu (clearly associated
with one specific wifi card in the gnome shell menu) turns off ALL
wifi cards - something that rather stumped me. Using "ifconfig wlan0
down" to force one card down will apparently confuse NetworkManager and
won't result in working internet over the wlan1 card either, despite
the wlan1 card still being perfectly connected.

Gnome 3/networkmanager with cable/lan networking:

I plugged in the lan cable and had trouble with the internet, so I
wanted to check on the settings - but there is no entry for it? Wifi
is obvious to find, but lan simply won't appear. Is
it even connected? Does it work? Gnome shell doesn't appear to tell
me. I got further by scratching up my command line knowledge to use
"ifconfig". To find out more through the GUI, I had to come up with
the genius idea to
click wifi>"wifi settings" or check out inside the Airplane mode menu.
That seems like a rather unobvious place to find that.

Gnome 3/wifi with one card:

That seems to be about the only thing that works nicely.

Disclaimer: when I say "it isn't possible", I refer to how it seemed
to me as a user. Maybe there are hidden buttons I missed, or I'm too
stupid for gnome shell :) still I hope this message helps in possibly
revamping things to make them more intuitive.


Regards,
Jonas Thiem
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