GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 681532
"Wired" and "Wireless" in the network indicator
Last modified: 2012-08-30 12:14:33 UTC
Once, a very long time ago, NM only supported ethernet and wifi, which it referred to as "wired" and "wireless". These days it supports multiple kinds of wired connections, and multiple kinds of wireless connections, but was still using "wired" to mean only ethernet, and "wireless" to mean only wifi. nm-connection-editor and nm-applet have just been changed to refer to these as "Ethernet" and "Wi-Fi" instead. The shell may want to follow suit. (Especially if bug 650123 (wimax support) was going to land too.)
Marking ui-review. The strings are part of the design.
"Wi-Fi" is common and makes sense wrt also having mobile broadband. I'm a bit unsure about "Ethernet" though - it's rather technical, and I'm not convinced that people will understand what it'll mean. Dan - can you give us a list of the connection types that will be supported?
In 0.9.6, the supported connection types are: Bond Bluetooth DSL Ethernet InfiniBand Mobile Broadband VLAN Wi-Fi WiMAX 0.9.8 will (probably) add Bridge and FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet). Of those, DSL, Ethernet, InfiniBand, and FCoE are wire-based. > I'm a bit > unsure about "Ethernet" though - it's rather technical, and I'm not convinced > that people will understand what it'll mean. Even Apple calls it that, in both the UI and the docs. Eg: "To access the Internet or a network, connect one end of an Ethernet cable to the Ethernet port on your iMac. Connect the other end to a cable modem, a DSL modem, or a network." (iMac Quick Start Guide) (Though really, how often do non-technical users even need to think about wired network connections anyway? Most people just use wifi everywhere...)
I'm fine with using Wi-Fi I guess. But there is no way I want to see Ethernet in the shell menu. It is fine as a technical part of the Network Settings but shouldn't confront the user if they just want to pick a wireless access point. So, perhaps we should only show it in the shell menu if it is connected. There isn't much you can do with it otherwise anyway.
That makes sense to me. I don't know why you would turn Wired off, anyway. You can always go to the network settings to do that.
happening as part of the "handle multiple nics better" bug *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 677142 ***