Hi Yamakaky, netctl, wpa_supplicant, and NetworkManager all manage your network interface connections (your OSI layer 2 connections). dhcpcd and dhclient are DHCP clients, responsible for automatically getting you an IP address (OSI layer 3). More information about these tools can be found on the Arch Wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wireless#Wireless_management I prefer to use wpa_supplicant because it is very simple, and exposes much of the low level stuff. I have heard that it can be annoying to maintain, but I haven't reached that drawback yet. My strategy is to use the most minimal tool available until I understand why it is better to use higher level tools. I would like to move to NetworkManager because I run chronyd and want to bring it online and offline as my Internet connection comes and goes, which wpa_supplicant does not support AFAIK. But I haven't been able to get it to work yet. For my DHCP client I chose dhcpcd, for no particular reason. Hope that helps. Dolan On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 10:39:34AM +0200, Yamakaky wrote: > Hi all > > I write you this mail because I'm a bit lost between all these network > configuration tools available : > > - systemd-networkd > - dhcpcd service > - netctl > - wpa_supplicant > - NetworkManager/wicd > > There is two profiles I use now : a laptop (wifi auto-discover and connect > with gui tray and easy to add network, ethernet auto-connect) and a > raspberry py server (low ressources, ethernet only, dhcp configured, config > not often changed). Actually, I use nm on my laptop (it's much much better > than wicd) and dhcpcd on my raspberry pi. What would you use and why ? > > Additional question : it seems systemd-timesyncd requires systemd-networkd, > is it true ? > > Thanks > Yamakaky
