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Can you explain to me why netplan is bad?

When it came out in an LTS, I was impressed by being able to declaratively describe networking. And there's even a way to test a configuration with auto rollback.

These are features that I find great in thing like juniper routers.

But when I went online to see what people thought there just was annoyance.

It made no sense to me.




> Can you explain to me why netplan is bad?

I don't see the advantage over networkmanager, honestly. And now there's another thing I have to learn and support, with no real benefit.


I really think that netplan exists because "everyone knows" networkmanager is bad. Ironically, I think it's for the same reason that netplan is now bad; it's a leaky abstraction which doesn't always support the feature you want. I've worked with people who disable nm as a matter of muscle memory on new systems, and I wonder how long it'll be until netplan goes that route (hehe).


Well, unless you used to do bridges with nmcli (and if you did, i'm really impressed), netplan do have some advantages.

And for all the swearing i did when i add to change the packer conf, then the ansible conf, i do think netplan is in fact easier to understand, read and change than brctl/bridge-utils.

I hate snaps though.


Uhm, so far I've used network manager for wired and wireless ethernet, vpns via openvpn and fortinet, and network bonding (lacp etc).

Yeah you have to look the details for the specific kind of configuration, but reading the fine manual is the norm, not the exception.


Would you use NetworkManager on a server?


Most of the enterprise world does, it's the default in RHEL (in 7 for sure, it probably still is in rhel8).

And regarding me personally: yes I would and I do. It's not that bad.


netplan brings "generate" and "apply" and so on but that's about all the usefulness it brought while doing so completely upended the configuration format and supported functionality. It seems like there could have been a less disruptive way to add that functionality, or at least netplan could have been more feature complete when they switched to it.


Ubuntu really is starting to look like canonical wants to do its own version of everything. That's my reading.




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