Helper software for twm/fvwm/etc

Unless you were talking about using a very old version of Network-Manager. If so you should probably re-evaluate as it's massively better then it was when it was new. Matured massively in capabilities and stability.

Why do I say this?

Because Network-Manager depends on wpa_supplicant.

On my Fedora 14 box:

rpm -qR $(rpm -qf $(which NetworkManager)) |grep wpa
wpa_supplicant >= 1:0.6.8-4

I used wpa_supplicant.conf to manage it for me. Worked flawlessly for WPA, 802.1x, and unauthenticated at the least.

You can't manage wireless connections through it (adding, removing, etc.). Only nm-applet supports it. You could hack the XML config files I suppose, but wpa_supplicant.conf is easier in that case (except the root requirement, but to avoid XML and a session dbus for just one app, I'll take it).

> I'm not sure I remember the time when I was last forced to think about the fact that I have different SSIDs at home and at work, etc.

wpa_supplicant.conf allows you to do the same. The priority= setting allows it to choose in the face of choice as well. I don't recall NM having that last I used it.

The only practical difference between NM and wpa_supplicant in my experience is that NM will connect and drop automatically where I need to do "ifup" manually. However, where NM will drop at a network disruption, ifup will stay up until I take it down. That, IMO, is well worth the slight inconvenience of an ifup at boot (which is in the history right alongside exec startx).

>This starts looking as script-language reimplementation of Network Manager. May be better to use the real thing?
If NM were just a collection of scripts which ran in certain conditions which it could detect accurately, maybe I would. What it seems to be is a convoluted mess designed to make easy things easy, hard things impossible while introducing six new points of failure inside a black box I can neither inspect nor control.

>Or perhaps (as drag suspects) you just enjoy suffering.
My setup allows me to connect wirelessly without effort and to easily recover from a myriad of wireless connectivity issues, ranging from "The buggy driver decided to randomly stop functioning" to "Oh my the radio just switched off of its own accord" to "The AP thinks I need to reconnect" to "The AP just got mad and disappeared for 30 seconds, but it's back now." I could go on. NM tends to freak out unless everything runs exactly as expected and - worse! - tends to automatically do the *wrong* thing for the situation. wpa_supplicant handles the common case correctly and does *nothing* in the uncommon case, allowing me to choose the appropriate resolution. Call that "suffering" if you like, I call it liberating.

>LCD made screen resolution adjustment kinda pointless (there are just one native resolution and X.org servers were able to find and use it for quite long time) and as for wireless... it's not the question of "how to configure it" (you don't configure it all that often), but how to use it.
Semantics. When I want to change my screen resolution during a session from one thing to another, I xrandr. Any graphical tool would just be a more convoluted way to issue the same instructions I issue by hand (and likely after tripping through menus whose structure I can never quite remember between infrequent use). Nothng's easier than "[xterm keybinding]xrandr -whatever-i-want[CTRL+D]"

>I'm not sure I remember the time when I was last forced to think about the fact that I have different SSIDs at home and at work, etc.
Good. Same here. You don't need NM for that.

>Okay, I lie: when I obtain new laptop (or tablet, or anything else) I need to briefly recall that you need to actually enter the names of APs and accompanying passwords (the one at work which requires new certificate stored in TPM is especially painful to setup), but then I just forget all about configs - I just use the internat/Internet and that's it.
Good. What does this have to do with NM? You aren't describing, so far, anything that NM does that wpa_supplicant doesn't.

wpa_supplicant is great and makes my life easier, whereas NM has never done anything but cause me pain. I can't find a single feature of NM that is useful (other than "We wrote our GUI tools against it instead of just using wpa_supplicant like normal people") and I suspect that it would never have existed if Fedora had had a sane way to configure networks to begin with.