The Internet Systems Consortium has stopped maintaining their DHCP client, which is standard on a lot of distros.
Debian has updated its documentation and now warns users to choose an alternative:
https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/isc-dhcp-client
On Debian Unstable, I was already forced to uninstall it in yesterday’s upgrade.
If you’re using network-manager, you don’t need to worry, since it includes its own dhcp client, but for others, this might be relevant.
On Arch, this concerns the dhcpd package:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dhcpd
Not directly, but distros may choose to create a dependency.
On Debian, installing recommended dependencies is enabled by default and disabling them can lead to all sorts of errors and missing functionality.
gnome-shell recommends gnome-control-center, which recommends network-manager-gnome, which depends on network-manager.
So unless you go out of your way to install a very minimal system, it gets pulled in.
From my point of view, nothing else but NetworkManager makes sense to ship by default for a distribution aimed at desktop use. So I fully understand distributions doing this. My point was rather that this is not related to any particular WM / DE.
I don’t think so. Dhcpcd + wpa_supplicant is really light, suitable for light installers, and live USB stick images.
I’ve been using dhcpcd + wpa_supplicant for so long… I do understand currently users prefer NM, but I hope there’s no push for it to be the unique way to manage network connectivity, and on light installers, I hope I’m not force to use NM either.
I mean traditionally NetworkManager uses wpa_supplicant anyways though there is the option for iwd. So it will stay available for quite some time.