Switching from wicked to NetworkManager

Intro

NetworkManager was used already a long time for the majority of openSUSE Tumbleweed installations, except for server, MicroOS and Kubic. But more and more users requested NetworkManager also for this flavours, since wicked is missing some functionality (like 5G modem support) or there are k8s network plugins, which only support NetworkManager. And since MicroOS Desktop was already using Networking, it was a logical choice to switch completly. So openSUSE MicroOS and openSUSE Kubic are now using NetworkManager as default instead of wicked since quite some time.

Configuration files

As of today there are no plans to automatically switch a system from wicked to NetworkManager. The reason is: depending on the configuration, it may be as easy as just replacing wicked with NetworkManager and everything will continue to work, or, in worst case, everything needs to be re-created from scratch for NetworkManager. There is no feature parity between this tools, so an automatic conversation may not work in all cases.

The /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-* files should be compatible, but it’s not clear if there are no corner cases where they are incompatible. A migratoin should be pretty easy in this case. But if a native wicked xml configuration is in use, a manual migration of the configuration has to be done.

Migration

If the network configuration got created during installation or if only ifcfg-* files are used, the switch to NetworkManager should be very simple. Just replace wicked with NetworkManager:

# transactional-update shell
-> zypper in --no-recommends NetworkManager
-> rpm -e wicked wicked-service
-> systemctl enable --now NetworkManager
-> exit
# reboot