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.

And even worse, some tools store configuration data in different places depending on the network stack. E.g. firewalld zone informations are either stored in the NetworkManager configuration files, in ifcfg-* or in the native firewalld configuration files.

Migration

If the machine get’s configured via dhcp and no fancy network tools or configuration is used, exchanging wicked with NetworkManager is quite simple:

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

But if the network configuration is not a simple dhcp client or if there are problems with the network afterwards, the clear recommendation is to make a fresh installation of openSUSE MicroOS. With the openSUSE MicroOS design, this should be quite simple and fast.