14 DAY TRIAL // While most of us are currently preparing to upgrade our GNU/Linux distributions to the recently released NetworkManager 1.4.4 stable build, the development team continues to work on the next major version, NetworkManager 1.6.
The NetworkManager 1.5.3 milestone, the second in the series, was released a few days ago for public testing. As usual, we took a look at the new changes to keep our users informed about the upcoming features of NetworkManager 1.6, which should land sometime in spring next year, close to the release of the GNOME 3.24 desktop.
As with any major milestone of any software project, closed-source or open-source, lots of exciting new features are on their way to enhance the overall experience of the application on users' computers. NetworkManager is already the most used network connection management tool for Linux-based operating systems.
And it looks like NetworkManager 1.6 will be an awesome release shipping with Vala bindings for the libnm library, the ability to keep most network connections up during shutdown, except for Wi-Fi, VPN, and other similar connections that cannot be assumed on startup, and support for systemd-resolved as local DNS forwarder backend.
Web Proxy settings now discovered and configured with the PacRunner service
Another interesting feature landing in the NetworkManager 1.6 release is the ability to discover and configure Web Proxy settings using the PacRunner service. A brand-new connection.autoconnect_retries property ensures fine-tuning of the autoconnect behavior, and the configuration can now be read from /run/NetworkManager/conf.d too.
"The configuration is now read from /run/NetworkManager/conf.d as well. This is useful for handing over configuration discovered on system startup to NetworkManager," explained the developers in the release notes, which we've attached at the end of the article for your reading pleasure.
Other noteworthy changes in NetworkManager 1.6 include support for using the cloned.mac-address property with both Bridge and Bond devices, support for the nmtui command to create and edit IP tunnel connections, and support for ipv6.method=shared, which can be used for fetching prefixes for the network interface via the DHCPv6 Prefix Delegation option.
There are many other improvements and bug fixes that'll be incorporated in NetworkManager 1.6, and you can read all about the upcoming changes in the release notes attached below. In the meantime, you can download NetworkManager 1.5.3 right now from our website and take the application for a test drive.