GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 665194
Wifi on/off switch cannot match hardware killswitch state
Last modified: 2011-12-07 14:36:55 UTC
If I enable wifi killswitch (manually disabling wifi by a hardware slider on my notebook), the gnome-shell indicator just puts the wifi toggle into Off state. But it can be toggled back to On state. In that case nothing happens and the toggles reverts back to Off. A user that doesn't know/forgets about the hardware slider can then be confused. I think it would be much better design to hide the On-Off toggle and put a "hardware switch off" text (or similar) there. It would follow the same design as when you unplug the wired cable - the toggle is hidden and a text "cable unplugged" appears instead.
OK, first I thought you were saying turning on the hardware killswitch wasn't bringing the WiFi on in the menu. To be clear, the problem you describe is that when a *physical* kill switch is present, toggling the switch in the network menu cannot turn the WiFi on, since the physical switch won't magically move. So we'd need to remove the "virtual" switch. But maybe there's another solution: if we can detect whether the killswitch is a physical one or not, we can adapt the UI as needed.
Thanks for clearing up my words, you're correct. If you detect the notebook has the physical wifi switch off, remove the virtual switch in gnome-shell because it can't have any effect.
Created attachment 202656 [details] [review] NetworkMenu: show hardware disabled when rfkill is active When wifi or wwan are blocked by hardware killswitch, we should not allow changing the switch (it won't work anyway), and show "hardware disabled" instead, similar to what we already do in the bluetooth menu.
Review of attachment 202656 [details] [review]: Looks good.
Attachment 202656 [details] pushed as 7fa7d04 - NetworkMenu: show hardware disabled when rfkill is active